Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Christine P. Travers and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected,
all other inconsistencies are as in the original.
Author's spelling has been maintained.
Missing page numbers correspond to blank pages.]
ROBERT BURNS
BY
PRINCIPAL SHAIRP,
PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1906
_All rights reserved_
_First Edition April 1879_
_Reprinted December 1879, 1883, 1887, 1895, 1902, 1906_
CONTENTS.
Page
CHAPTER I.
Youth in Ayrshire 1
CHAPTER II.
First Winter in Edinburgh 42
CHAPTER III.
Border and Highland Tours 60
CHAPTER IV.
Second Winter in Edinburgh 79
CHAPTER V.
Life at Ellisland 94
CHAPTER VI.
Migration To Dumfries 135
CHAPTER VII.
Last Years 155
CHAPTER VIII.
Character, Poems, Songs 188
INDEX 209
ROBERT BURNS. (p. 001)
CHAPTER I.
YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE.
Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we
recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of
men is in some sort a measure of their greatness. Tried by this
standard, Burns must be great indeed, for during the eighty years that
have passed since his death, men's interest in the man himself and
their estimate of his genius have been steadily increasing. Each
decade since he died has produced at least two biographies of him.
When Mr. Carlyle wrote his well-known essay on Burns in 1828, he could
already number six biographies of the Poet, which had been given to
the world during the previous thirty years; and the interval between
1828 and the present day has added, in at least the same proportion,
to their number. What it was in the man and in his circumstances that
has attracted so much of the world's interest to Burns, I must make
one more attempt to describe.
If success were that which most secures men's sympathy, Burns would
have won but little regard; for in all but his poetry his was a (p. 002)
defeated life--sad and heart-depressing to contemplate beyond the
lives even of most poets.
Perhaps it may be the very fact that in him so much failure and
shipwreck were combined with such splendid gifts, that has attracted
to him so deep and compassionate interest. Let us review once more the
facts of that life, and tell again its oft-told story.
It was on the 25th of January, 1759, about two miles from the town of
Ayr, in a clay-built cottage, reared by his father's own hands, that
Robert Burns was born. The "auld clay bigging" which saw his birth
still stands by the side of the road that leads from Ayr to the river
and the bridge of Doon. Between the banks of that romantic stream and
the cottage is seen the roofless ruin of "Alloway's auld haunted
kirk," which Tam o' Shanter has made famous. His first welcome to the
world was a rough one. As he himself says,--
A blast o' Janwar' win'
Blew hansel in on Robin.
A few days after his birth, a storm blew down the gable of the
cottage, and the poet and his mother were carried in the dark morning
to the shelter of a neighbour's roof, under which they remained till
their own home was repaired. In after-years he would often say, "No
wonder that one ushered into the world amid such a tempest should be
the victim of stormy passions." "It is hard to be born in Scotland,"
says the brilliant Parisian. Burns had many hardships to endure, but
he never reckoned this to be one of them.
His father, William Burness or Burnes, for so he spelt his name, was a
native not of Ayrshire, but of Kincardineshire, where he had been
reared on a farm belonging to the forfeited estate of the noble (p. 003)
but attainted house of Keith-Marischal. Forced to migrate thence at
the age of nineteen, he had travelled to Edinburgh, and finally settled
in Ayrshire, and at the time when Robert, his eldest child, was born,
he rented seven acres of land, near the Brig o' Doon, which he
cultivated as a nursery-garden. He was a man of strict, even stubborn
integrity, and of strong temper--a combination which, as his son remarks,
does not usually lead to worldly success. But his chief characteristic
was his deep-seated and thoughtful piety. A peasant-saint of the old
Scottish stamp, he yet tempered the stern Calvinism of the West with
the milder Arminianism more common in his northern birthplace. Robert,
who, amid all his after-errors, never ceased to revere his father's
memory, has left an immortal portrait of him in _The Cotter's Saturday
Night_, when he describes how
The saint, the father, and the husband prays.
William Burness was advanced in years before he married, and his wife,
Agnes Brown, was much younger than himself. She is described as an
Ayrshire lass, of humble birth, very sagacious, with bright eyes and
intelligent looks, but not beautiful, of good manners and easy
address. Like her husband, she was sincerely religious, but of a more
equable temper, quick to perceive character, and with a memory stored
with old traditions, songs, and ballads, which she told or sang to
amuse her children. In his outer man the poet resembled his mother,
but his great mental gifts, if inherited at all, must be traced to his
father.
Three places in Ayrshire, besides his birthplace, will always be
remembered as the successive homes of Burns. These were Mount (p. 004)
Oliphant, Lochlea (pronounced Lochly), and Mossgiel.
MOUNT OLIPHANT.--This was a small upland farm, about two miles from
the Brig o' Doon, of a poor and hungry soil, belonging to Mr.
Ferguson, of Doon-holm, who was also the landlord of William Burness'
previous holding. Robert was in his seventh year when his father
entered on this farm at Whitsuntide, 1766, and he had reached his
eighteenth when the lease came to a close in 1777. All the years
between these two dates were to the family of Burness one long sore
battle with untoward circumstances, ending in defeat. If the hardest
toil and severe self-denial could have procured success, they would
not have failed. It was this period of his life which Robert
afterwards described, as combining "the cheerless gloom of a hermit
with the unceasing moil of galley-slave." The family did their best,
but a niggard soil and bad seasons were too much for them. At length,
on the death of his landlord, who had always dealt generously by him,
William Burness fell into the grip of a factor, whose tender mercies
were hard. This man wrote letters which set the whole family in tears.
The poet has not given his name, but he has preserved his portrait in
colours which are indelible:--
I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day,
An' mony a time my heart's been wae,
Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash,
How they maun thole a factor's snash;
He'll stamp an' threaten, curse and swear,
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear,
While they maun stan', wi aspect humble,
And hear it a', an' fear an' tremble.
In his autobiographical sketch the poet tells us that, "The farm
proved a ruinous bargain. I was the eldest of seven children, and (p. 005)
my father, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labour. His
spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom
in the lease in two years more; and to weather these two years we
retrenched expenses, and toiled on." Robert and Gilbert, the two
eldest, though still boys, had to do each a grown man's full work. Yet
for all their hardships these Mount Oliphant days were not without
alleviations. If poverty was at the door, there was warm family
affection by the fireside. If the two sons had, long before manhood,
to bear toil beyond their years, still they were living under their
parents' roof, and those parents two of the wisest and best of
Scotland's peasantry. Work was no doubt incessant, but education was
not neglected--rather it was held one of the most sacred duties. When
Robert was five years old, he had been sent to a school at Alloway
Mill, and when the family removed to Mount Oliphant, his father
combined with four of his neighbours to hire a young teacher, who
boarded among them, and taught their children for a small salary. This
young teacher, whose name was Murdoch, has left an interesting
description of his two young pupils, their parents, and the household
life while he sojourned at Mount Oliphant. At that time Murdoch
thought that Gilbert possessed a livelier imagination, and was more of
a wit than Robert. "All the mirth and liveliness," he says, "were with
Gilbert. Robert's countenance at that time wore generally a grave and
thoughtful look." Had their teacher been then told that one of his two
pupils would become a great poet, he would have fixed on Gilbert. When
he tried to teach them church music along with other rustic lads, they
two lagged far behind the rest. Robert's voice especially was
untuneable, and his ear so dull, that it was with difficulty he could
distinguish one tune from another. Yet this was he who was to (p. 006)
become the greatest song-writer that Scotland--perhaps the world--has
known. In other respects the mental training of the lads was of the
most thorough kind. Murdoch taught them not only to read, but to
parse, and to give the exact meaning of the words, to turn verse into
the prose order, to supply ellipses, and to substitute plain for
poetic words and phrases. How many of our modern village schools even
attempt as much? When Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertook
the education of his children, and carried it on at night after
work-hours were over. Of that father Murdoch speaks as by far the best
man he ever knew. Tender and affectionate towards his children he
describes him, seeking not to drive, but to lead them to the right, by
appealing to their conscience and their better feelings, rather than
to their fears. To his wife he was gentle and considerate in an
unusual degree, always thinking of her ease and comfort; and she
repaid it with the utmost reverence. She was a careful and thrifty
housewife, but, whenever her domestic tasks allowed, she would return
to hang with devout attention on the discourse that fell from her wise
husband. Under that father's guidance knowledge was sought for as hid
treasure, and this search was based on the old and reverential faith
that increase of knowledge is increase of wisdom and goodness. The
readings of the household were wide, varied, and unceasing. Some one
entering the house at meal-time found the whole family seated, each
with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other. The books which Burns
mentions as forming part of their reading at Mount Oliphant surprise us
even now. Not only the ordinary school-books and geographies, not only
the traditional life of Wallace and other popular books of that (p. 007)
sort, but The Spectator, odd plays of Shakespeare, Pope (his Homer
included), Locke on the Human Understanding, Boyle's Lectures,
Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, Allan Ramsay's works,
formed the staple of their reading. Above all there was a collection
of songs, of which Burns says, "This was my _vade mecum_. I pored over
them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by
verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime, from affectation
and fustian, I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my
critic-craft, such as it is!" And he could not have learnt it in a
better way.
There are few countries in the world which could at that time have
produced in humble life such a teacher as Murdoch and such a father as
William Burness. It seems fitting, then, that a country which could
rear such men among its peasantry should give birth to such a poet as
Robert Burns to represent them. The books which fed his young
intellect were devoured only during intervals snatched from hard toil.
That toil was no doubt excessive. And this early over-strain showed
itself soon in the stoop of his shoulders, in nervous disorder about
the heart, and in frequent fits of despondency. Yet perhaps too much
has sometimes been made of these bodily hardships, as though Burns's
boyhood had been one long misery. But the youth which grew up in so
kindly an atmosphere of wisdom and home affection, under the eye of
such a father and mother, cannot be called unblest.
Under the pressure of toil and the entire want of society, Burns might
have grown up the rude and clownish and unpopular lad that he has been
pictured in his early teens. But in his fifteenth summer there came to
him a new influence, which at one touch unlocked the springs of (p. 008)
new emotions. This incident must be given in his own words:--"You
know," he says, "our country custom of coupling a man and woman
together as partners in the labours of the harvest. In my fifteenth
summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than
myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her
justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a
bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to
herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of
acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I
hold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught the
contagion I cannot tell.... Indeed I did not know myself why I liked
so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from
our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill
like an Æolian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furious
ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the
cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring qualities,
she sung sweetly; and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted
giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to
imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men
who read Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be
composed by a country laird's son, on one of his father's maids with
whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well
as he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep, and cast peats, his
father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than
myself. Thus with me began love and poetry."
The song he then composed is entitled "Handsome Nell," and is the (p. 009)
first he ever wrote. He himself speaks of it as very puerile and
silly--a verdict which Chambers endorses, but in which I cannot agree.
Simple and artless it no doubt is, but with a touch of that grace
which bespeaks the true poet. Here is one verse which, for directness
of feeling and felicity of language, he hardly ever surpassed:--
She dresses aye sae clean and neat,
Baith decent and genteel,
And then there's something in her gait
Gars ony dress look weel.
"I composed it," says Burns, "in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to
this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at
the remembrance."
LOCHLEA.--Escaped from the fangs of the factor, with some remnant of
means, William Burness removed from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea in the
parish of Tarbolton (1777), an upland undulating farm, on the north
bank of the River Ayr, with a wide outlook, southward over the hills
of Carrick, westward toward the Isle of Arran, Ailsa Craig, and down
the Firth of Clyde, toward the Western Sea. This was the home of Burns
and his family from his eighteenth till his twenty-fifth year. For a
time the family life here was more comfortable than before, probably
because several of the children were now able to assist their parents
in farm labour. "These seven years," says Gilbert Burns, "brought
small literary improvement to Robert," but I can hardly believe this
when we remember that Lochlea saw the composition of _The Death and
Dying Words of Poor Mailie_, and of _My Nannie, O_, and one or two more
of his most popular songs. It was during those days that Robert, (p. 010)
then growing into manhood, first ventured to step beyond the range of
his father's control, and to trust the promptings of his own social
instincts and headlong passions. The first step in this direction was
to go to a dancing school, in a neighbouring village, that he might
there meet companions of either sex, and give his rustic manners "a
brush," as he phrases it. The next step was taken when Burns resolved
to spend his nineteenth summer in Kirkoswald, to learn mensuration and
surveying from the schoolmaster there, who was famous as a teacher of
these things. Griswold, on the Carrick coast, was a village full of
smugglers and adventurers, in whose society Burns was introduced to
scenes of what he calls "swaggering riot and roaring dissipation." It
may readily be believed that with his strong love of sociality and
excitement he was an apt pupil in that school. Still the mensuration
went on till one day, when in the kail-yard behind the teachers house,
Burns met a young lass, who set his heart on fire, and put an end to
mensuration. This incident is celebrated in the song beginning--
Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns
Bring Autumn's pleasant weather,--
"the ebullition," he calls it, "of that passion which ended the school
business at Kirkoswald."
From this time on for several years, love making was his chief
amusement, or rather his most serious business. His brother tells us
that he was in the secret of half the love affairs of the parish of
Tarbolton, and was never without at least one of his own. There was
not a comely girl in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a song, and
then he made one which included them all. When he was thus inly (p. 011)
moved, "the agitations of his mind and body," says Gilbert, "exceeded
anything of the kind I ever knew in real life. He had always a
particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or had
more consequence. His love therefore rarely settled on persons of this
description." The jealousy here noted, as extending even to his loves,
was one of the weakest points of the poet's character. Of the ditties
of that time, most of which have been preserved, the best specimen is
_My Nannie, O_. This song, and the one entitled _Mary Morison_ render
the whole scenery and sentiment of those rural meetings in a manner at
once graphic and free from coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must be
said that those gloaming trysts, however they may touch the imagination
and lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at the root of much
that degrades the life and habits of the Scottish peasantry.
But those first three or four years at Lochlea, if not free from
peril, were still with the poet times of innocence. His brother
Gilbert, in the words of Chambers, "used to speak of his brother as at
this period, to himself, a more admirable being than at any other. He
recalled with delight the days when they had to go with one or two
companions to cut peats for the winter fuel, because Robert was sure
to enliven their toil with a rattling fire of witty remarks on men and
things, mingled with the expressions of a genial glowing heart, and
the whole perfectly free from the taint which he afterwards acquired
from his contact with the world. Not even in those volumes which
afterwards charmed his country from end to end, did Gilbert see his
brother in so interesting a light as in these conversations in the
bog, with only two or three noteless peasants for an audience."
While Gilbert acknowledges that his brother's love-makings were at (p. 012)
this time unceasing, he asserts that they were "governed by the
strictest rules of virtue and modesty, from which he never deviated
till he reached his twenty-third year." It was towards the close of
his twenty-second that there occurs the record of his first serious
desire to marry and settle in life. He had set his affections on a
young woman named Ellison Begbie, daughter of a small farmer, and at
that time servant in a family on Cessnock Water, about two miles from
Lochlea. She is said to have been not a beauty, but of unusual
liveliness and grace of mind. Long afterwards, when he had seen much
of the world, Burns spoke of this young woman as, of all those on whom
he ever fixed his fickle affections, the one most likely to have made
a pleasant partner for life. Four letters which he wrote to her are
preserved, in which he expresses the most pure and honourable feelings
in language which, if a little formal, is, for manliness and
simplicity, a striking contrast to the bombast of some of his later
epistles. Songs, too, he addressed to her--_The Lass of Cessnock
Banks_, _Bonnie Peggy Alison_, and _Mary Morison_. The two former are
inconsiderable; the latter is one of those pure and beautiful
love-lyrics, in the manner of the old ballads, which, as Hazlitt says,
"take the deepest and most lasting hold on the mind."
Yestreen, when to the trembling string,
The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha',
To thee my fancy took its wing,
I sat, but neither heard nor saw:
Tho' this was fair, and that was braw,
And yon the toast of a' the town,
I sigh'd, and said amang them a',
"Ye are na Mary Morison."
Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace, (p. 013)
Wha for thy sake wad gladly die;
Or canst thou break that heart of his,
Whase only faut is loving thee?
If love for love thou wilt na gie,
At least be pity to me shown;
A thought ungentle canna be
The thought o' Mary Morison.
In these lines the lyric genius of Burns was for the first time
undeniably revealed.
But neither letters nor love-songs prevailed. The young woman, for
some reason untold, was deaf to his entreaties, and the rejection of
this his best affection fell on him with a malign influence, just as
he was setting his face to learn a trade which he hoped would enable
him to maintain a wife.
Irvine was at that time a centre of the flax-dressing art, and as
Robert and his brother raised flax on their farm, they hoped that if
they could dress as well as grow flax, they might thereby double their
profits. As he met with this heavy disappointment in love just as he
was setting out for Irvine, he went thither downhearted and depressed,
at Midsummer, 1781. All who met him at that time were struck with his
look of melancholy, and his moody silence, from which he roused
himself only when in pleasant female society, or when he met with men
of intelligence. But the persons of this sort whom he met in Irvine
were probably few. More numerous were the smugglers and rough-living
adventurers with which that seaport town, as Kirkoswald, swarmed.
Among these he contracted, says Gilbert, "some acquaintance of a freer
manner of thinking and living than he had been used to, whose society
prepared him for over-leaping the bonds of rigid virtue which had
hitherto restrained him." One companion, a sailor-lad of wild life (p. 014)
and loose and irregular habits, had a wonderful fascination for Burns,
who admired him for what he thought his independence and magnanimity.
"He was," says Burns, "the only man I ever knew who was a greater fool
than myself, where woman was the presiding star; but he spoke of
lawless love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with horror.
_Here his friendship did me a mischief._"
Another companion, older than himself, thinking that the religious
views of Burns were too rigid and uncompromising, induced him to adopt
"more liberal opinions," which in this case, as in so many others,
meant more lax opinions. With his principles of belief, and his rules
of conduct at once assailed and undermined, what chart or compass
remained any more for a passionate being like Burns over the
passion-swept sea of life that lay before him? The migration to Irvine
was to him the descent to Avernus, from which he never afterwards, in
the actual conduct of life, however often in his hours of inspiration,
escaped to breathe again the pure upper air. This brief but disastrous
Irvine sojourn was brought to a sudden close. Burns was robbed by his
partner in trade, his flax-dressing shop was burnt to the ground by
fire during the carousal of a New Year's morning, and himself,
impaired in purse, in spirits, and in character, returned to Lochlea
to find misfortunes thickening round his family, and his father on his
death-bed. For the old man, his long struggle with scanty means,
barren soil, and bad seasons, was now near its close. Consumption had
set in. Early in 1784, when his last hour drew on, the father said
that there was one of his children of whose future he could not think
without fear. Robert, who was in the room, came up to his bedside (p. 015)
and asked, "O father, is it me you mean?" The old man said it was.
Robert turned to the window, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and
his bosom swelling, from the restraint he put on himself, almost to
bursting. The father had early perceived the genius that was in his
boy, and even in Mount Oliphant days had said to his wife, "Whoever
lives to see it, something extraordinary will come from that boy." He
had lived to see and admire his son's earliest poetic efforts. But he
had also noted the strong passions, with the weak will, which might
drive him on the shoals of life.
MOSSGIEL.--Towards the close of 1783, Robert and his brother, seeing
clearly the crash of family affairs which was impending, had taken on
their own account a lease of the small farm of Mossgiel, about two or
three miles distant from Lochlea, in the parish of Mauchline. When
their father died in February, 1784, it was only by claiming the
arrears of wages due to them, and ranking among their father's
creditors, that they saved enough from the domestic wreck, to stock
their new farm. Thither they conveyed their widowed mother, and their
younger brothers and sisters, in March, 1784. Their new home was a
bare upland farm, 118 acres of cold clay-soil, lying within a mile of
Mauchline village. Burns entered on it with a firm resolution to be
prudent, industrious, and thrifty. In his own words, "I read farming
books, I calculated crops, I attended markets, and, in short, in spite
of the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man;
but the first year from unfortunately buying bad seed--the second,
from a late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all my
wisdom, and I returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was
washed to her wallowing in the mire." Burns was in the beginning (p. 016)
of his twenty-sixth year when he took up his abode at Mossgiel, where
he remained for four years. Three things those years and that bare
moorland farm witnessed,--the wreck of his hopes as a farmer, the
revelation of his genius as a poet, and the frailty of his character
as a man. The result of the immoral habits and "liberal opinions"
which he had learnt at Irvine were soon apparent in that event of
which he speaks in his _Epistle to John Rankine_ with such unbecoming
levity. In the Chronological Edition of his works it is painful to
read on one page the pathetic lines which he engraved on his father's
headstone, and a few pages on, written almost at the same time, the
epistle above alluded to, and other poems in the same strain, in which
the defiant poet glories in his shame. It was well for the old man
that he was laid in Alloway Kirkyard before these things befell. But
the widowed mother had to bear the burden, and to receive in her home
and bring up the child that should not have been born. When silence
and shame would have most become him, Burns poured forth his feelings
in ribald verses, and bitterly satirized the parish minister, who
required him to undergo that public penance which the discipline of
the Church at that time exacted. Whether this was a wise discipline or
not, no blame attached to the minister, who merely carried out the
rules which his Church enjoined. It was no proof of magnanimity in
Burns to use his talent in reviling the minister, who had done nothing
more than his duty. One can hardly doubt but that in his inmost heart
he must have been visited with other and more penitential feelings
than those unseemly verses express. But, as Lockhart has well observed,
"his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial associates know (p. 017)
how little he was able to drown the whispers of the still small voice;
and the fermenting bitterness of a mind ill at ease within himself
escaped--as may be often traced in the history of satirists--in angry
sarcasms against those who, whatever their private errors might be,
had at least done him no wrong." Mr. Carlyle's comment on this crisis
of his life is too weighty to be omitted here. "With principles
assailed by evil example from without, by 'passions raging like
demons' from within, he had little need of sceptical misgivings to
whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat
if he were already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his
mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides
there; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him.
Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world; his
character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted
worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his
only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is
but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation gathers over him,
broken only by the red lightnings of remorse." Amid this trouble it
was but a poor vanity and miserable love of notoriety which could
console itself with the thought
The mair they talk, I'm kent the better,
E'en let them clash.
Or was this not vanity at all, but the bitter irony of self-reproach?
This collision with the minister and Kirk Session of his parish, and
the bitter feelings it engendered in his rebellious bosom, at once
launched Burns into the troubled sea of religious controversy that was
at that time raging all around him. The clergy of the West were divided
into two parties, known as the Auld Lights and the New Lights. (p. 018)
Ayrshire and the west of Scotland had long been the stronghold of
Presbyterianism and of the Covenanting spirit; and in Burns's day--a
century and a half after the Covenant--a large number of the ministers
still adhered to its principles, and preached the Puritan theology
undiluted. These men were democratic in their ecclesiastical views,
and stout protestors against Patronage, which has always been the
bugbear of the sects in Scotland. As Burns expresses it, they did
their best to stir up their flocks to
Join their counsel and their skills
To cowe the lairds,
An' get the brutes the power themsels
To chuse their herds.
All Burns's instincts would naturally have been on the side of those
who wished to resist patronage and "to cowe the lairds," had not this
his natural tendency been counteracted by a stronger bias drawing him
in an opposite direction. The Auld Lights, though democrats in Church
politics, were the upholders of that strict church discipline under
which he was smarting, and to this party belonged his own minister,
who had brought that discipline to bear upon him. Burns, therefore,
naturally threw himself into the arms of the opposite, or New Light
party, who were more easy in their life and in their doctrine. This
large and growing section of ministers were deeply imbued with
rationalism, or, as they then called it, "common-sense," in the light
of which they pared away from religion all that was mysterious and
supernatural. Some of them were said to be Socinians or even pure Deists,
most of them shone less in the pulpit, than at the festive board. (p. 019)
With such men a person in Burns's then state of mind would readily
sympathize, and they received him with open arms. Nothing could have
been more unfortunate than that in this crisis of his career he should
have fallen into intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded
men. They were the first persons of any pretensions to scholarly
education with whom he had mingled freely. He amused them with the
sallies of his wit and sarcasm, and astonished them by his keen
insight and vigorous powers of reasoning. They abetted those very
tendencies in his nature which required to be checked. Their
countenance, as clergymen, would allay the scruples and misgivings he
might otherwise have felt, and stimulate to still wilder recklessness
whatever profanity he might be tempted to indulge in. When he had let
loose his first shafts of satire against their stricter brethren,
those New Light ministers heartily applauded him; and hounded him on
to still more daring assaults. He had not only his own quarrel with
his parish minister and the stricter clergy to revenge, but the
quarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county
lawyer, who had fallen under Church censure for neglect of Church
ordinances, and had been debarred from the Communion. Burns espoused
Gavin's cause with characteristic zeal, and let fly new arrows one
after another from his satirical quiver.
The first of these satires against the orthodox ministers was _The Twa
Herds, or the Holy Tulzie_, written on a quarrel between two brother
clergymen. Then followed in quick succession _Holy Willie's Prayer_,
_The Ordination_, and _The Holy Fair_. His good mother and his brother
were pained by these performances, and remonstrated against them. But
Burns, though he generally gave ear to their counsel, in this (p. 020)
instance turned a deaf ear to it, and listened to other advisers. The
love of exercising his strong powers of satire and the applause of his
boon-companions, lay and clerical, prevailed over the whispers of his
own better nature and the advice of his truest friends. Whatever may
be urged in defence of employing satire to lash hypocrisy, I cannot
but think that those who have loved most what is best in Burns' poetry
must have regretted that these poems were ever written. Some have
commended them on the ground that they have exposed religious pretence
and Pharisaism. The good they may have done in this way is perhaps
doubtful. But the harm they have done in Scotland is not doubtful, in
that they have connected in the minds of the people so many coarse and
even profane thoughts with objects which they had regarded till then
with reverence. Even _The Holy Fair_, the poem in this kind which is
least offensive, turns on the abuses that then attended the
celebration of the Holy Communion in rural parishes, and with great
power portrays those gatherings in their most mundane aspects. Yet, as
Lockhart has well remarked, those things were part of the same
religious system which produced the scenes which Burns has so
beautifully described in _The Cotter's Saturday Night_. Strange that
the same mind, almost at the same moment, should have conceived two
poems so different in spirit as _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ and _The
Holy Fair_!
I have dwelt thus long on these unpleasant satires that I may not have
again to return to them. It is a more welcome task to turn to the
other poems of the same period. Though Burns had entered on Mossgiel
resolved to do his best as a farmer, he soon discovered that it was
not in that way he was to attain success. The crops of 1784 and (p. 021)
1785 both failed, and their failure seems to have done something
to drive him in on his own internal resources. He then for the first
time seems to have awakened to the conviction that his destiny was to
be a poet; and he forthwith set himself, with more resolution than he
ever showed before or after, to fulfil that mission. Hitherto he had
complained that his life had been without an aim; now he determined
that it should be so no longer. The dawning hope began to gladden him
that he might take his place among the bards of Scotland, who,
themselves mostly unknown, have created that atmosphere of minstrelsy
which envelopes and glorifies their native country. This hope and aim
is recorded in an entry of his commonplace book, of the probable date
of August, 1784:--
"However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly
the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent Fergusson, yet I am
hurt to see other places of Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, and
haughs, immortalized in such celebrated performances, while my dear
native country,--the ancient bailieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham,
famous both in ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike race
of inhabitants--a country where civil, and particularly religious
liberty, have ever found their first support, and their last asylum--a
country, the birthplace of many famous philosophers, soldiers, and
statesmen, and the scene of many important events recorded in Scottish
history, particularly a great many of the actions of the glorious
Wallace, the saviour of his country--yet we have never had one Scotch
poet of any eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic
woodlands and sequestered scenes of Ayr, and the heathy mountainous
source and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, (p. 022)
Tweed. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy; but, alas! I am far
unequal to the task, both, in native genius and in education. Obscure
I am, obscure I must be, though no young poet nor young soldier's
heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine."
Though the sentiment here expressed may seem commonplace and the
language hardly grammatical, yet this extract clearly reveals the
darling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It was the
same wish which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his
_Epistle to the Gude Wife of Wauchope House_.
E'en then, a wish, I mind its power,
A wish that to my latest hour
Shall strongly heave my breast,
That I for poor Auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least.
The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear,
I turn'd the weeder-clips aside,
An' spar'd the symbol dear.
It was about his twenty-fifth year when he first conceived the hope
that he might become a national poet. The failure of his first two
harvests, 1784 and '85, in Mossgiel may well have strengthened this
desire and changed it into a fixed purpose. If he was not to succeed
as a farmer, might he not find success in another employment that was
much more to his mind?
And this longing so deeply cherished, he had, within less than two
years from the time that the above entry in his diary was written,
amply fulfilled. From the autumn of 1784 till May 1786 the fountains
of poetry were unsealed within, and flowed forth in a continuous
stream. That period so prolific of poetry that none like it ever (p. 023)
afterwards visited him, saw the production not only of the satirical
poems already noticed, and of another more genial satire, _Death and
Dr. Hornbook_, but also of those characteristic epistles in which he
reveals so much of his own character, and of those other descriptive
poems in which he so wonderfully delineates the habits of the Scottish
peasantry.
Within from sixteen to eighteen months were composed, not only seven
or eight long epistles to rhyme-composing brothers in the neighbourhood,
David Sillar, John Lapraik, and others, but also, _Halloween_, _To a
Mouse_, _The Jolly Beggars_, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, _Address
to the Deil_, _The Auld Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare_, _The
Vision_, _The Twa Dogs_, _The Mountain Daisy_. The descriptive poems
above named followed each other in rapid succession during that
spring-time of his genius, having been all composed, as the latest
edition of his works shows, in a period of about six months, between
November, 1785, and April, 1786. Perhaps there are none of Burns'
compositions which give the real man more naturally and unreservedly
than his epistles. Written in the dialect he had learnt by his
father's fireside, to friends in his own station, who shared his own
tastes and feelings, they flow on in an easy stream of genial happy
spirits, in which kindly humour, wit, love of the outward world,
knowledge of men, are all beautifully intertwined into one strand of
poetry, unlike anything else that has been seen before or since. The
outward form of the verse and the style of diction are no doubt after
the manner of his two forerunners whom he so much admired, Ramsay and
Fergusson; but the play of soul and power of expression, the natural
grace with which they rise and fall, the vividness of every image, (p. 024)
and transparent truthfulness of every sentiment, are all his own. If
there is any exception to be made to this estimate, it is in the
grudge which here and there peeps out against those whom he thought
greater favourites of fortune than himself and his correspondents. But
taken as a whole, I know not any poetic epistles to be compared with
them. They are just the letters in which one friend might unbosom
himself to another without the least artifice or disguise. And the
broad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly fitted to the thought,
that not even Horace himself has surpassed it in "curious felicity."
Often, when harvests were failing and the world going against him, he
found his solace in pouring forth in rhyme his feelings to some
trusted friend. As he says in one of these same epistles,--
Leeze me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure,
My chief, amaist my only pleasure,
At hame, a-fiel', at wark, at leisure,
The Muse, poor hizzie!
Tho' rough an' raploch be her measure,
She's seldom lazy.
Of the poems founded on the customs of the peasantry, I shall speak in
the sequel. The garret in which all the poems of this period were
written is thus described by Chambers:--"The farmhouse of Mossgiel,
which still exists almost unchanged since the days of the poet, is
very small, consisting of only two rooms, a but and a ben as they are
called in Scotland. Over these, reached by a trap stair, is a small
garret, in which Robert and his brother used to sleep. Thither, when
he had returned from his day's work, the poet used to retire, and seat
himself at a small deal table, lighted by a narrow skylight in the roof,
to transcribe the verses which he had composed in the fields. His (p. 025)
favourite time for composition was at the plough. Long years afterwards
his sister, Mrs. Begg, used to tell how when her brother had gone
forth again to field work, she would steal up to the garret and search
the drawer of the deal table for the verses which Robert had newly
transcribed."
In which of the poems of this period his genius is most conspicuous it
might not be easy to determine. But there can be little question about
the justice of Lockhart's remark, that "_The Cotter's Saturday Night_
is of all Burns's pieces the one whose exclusion from the collection
would be most injurious, if not to the genius of the poet, 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 poem he has left us." Certainly it is the one
which has most endeared his name to the more thoughtful and earnest of
his countrymen. Strange it is, not to say painful, to think that this
poem, in which the simple and manly piety of his country is so finely
touched, and the image of his own religious father so beautifully
portrayed, should have come from the same hand which wrote nearly at
the same time _The Jolly Beggars_, _The Ordination_, and _The Holy
Fair_.
During those two years at Mossgiel, from 1784 to 1786, when the times
were hard, and the farm unproductive, Burns must indeed have found
poetry to be, as he himself says, its own reward. A nature like his
required some vent for itself, some excitement to relieve the pressure
of dull farm drudgery, and this was at once his purest and noblest
excitement. In two other more hazardous forms of excitement he was by
temperament disposed to seek refuge. These were conviviality and (p. 026)
love-making. In the former of these, Gilbert says that he indulged
little, if at all, during his Mossgiel period. And this seems proved
by his brother's assertion that during all that time Robert's private
expenditure never exceeded seven pounds a year. When he had dressed
himself on this, and procured his other necessaries, the margin that
remained for drinking must have been small indeed. But love-making--that
had been with him, ever since he reached manhood, an unceasing
employment. Even in his later teens he had, as his earliest songs
show, given himself enthusiastically to those nocturnal meetings,
which were then and are still customary among the peasantry of
Scotland, and which at the best are full of perilous temptation. But
ever since the time when, during his Irvine sojourn, he forsook the
paths of innocence, there is nothing in any of his love-affairs which
those who prize what was best in Burns would not willingly forget. If
here we allude to two such incidents, it is because they are too
intimately bound up with his life to be passed over in any account of
it. Gilbert says that while "one generally reigned paramount in
Robert's affections, he was frequently encountering other attractions,
which formed so many underplots in the drama of his love." This is
only too evident in those two loves which most closely touched his
destiny at this time.
From the time of his settlement at Mossgiel frequent allusions occur
in his letters and poems to flirtations with the belles of the
neighbouring village of Mauchline. Among all these Jean Armour, the
daughter of a respectable master-mason in that village, had the chief
place in his affections. All through 1785 their courtship had
continued, but early in 1786 a secret and irregular marriage, with (p. 027)
a written acknowledgment of it had to be effected. Then followed the
father's indignation that his daughter should be married to so wild
and worthless a man as Burns; compulsion of his daughter to give up
Burns, and to destroy the document which vouched their marriage;
Burns's despair driving him to the verge of insanity; the letting
loose by the Armours of the terrors of the law against him; his
skulking for a time in concealment; his resolve to emigrate to the
West Indies, and become a slave-driver. All these things were passing
in the spring months of 1786, and in September of the same year Jean
Armour became the mother of twin children.
It would be well if we might believe that the story of his betrothal
to Highland Mary was, as Lockhart seems to have thought, previous to
and independent of the incidents just mentioned. But the more recent
investigations of Mr. Scott Douglas and Dr. Chambers have made it too
painfully clear that it was almost at the very time when he was half
distracted by Jean Armour's desertion of him, and while he was writing
his broken-hearted _Lament_ over her conduct, that there occurred, as
an interlude, the episode of Mary Campbell. This simple and
sincere-hearted girl from Argyllshire was, Lockhart says, the object
of by far the deepest passion Burns ever knew. And Lockhart gives at
length the oft-told tale how, on the second Sunday of May, 1786, they
met in a sequestered spot by the banks of the River Ayr, to spend one
day of parting love; how they stood, one on either side of a small
brook, laved their hands in the stream, and, holding a Bible between
them, vowed eternal fidelity to each other. They then parted, never
again to meet. In October of the same year Mary came from Argyllshire,
as far as Greenock, in the hope of meeting Burns, but she was (p. 028)
there seized with a malignant fever which soon laid her in an early
grave.
The Bible, in two volumes, which Burns gave her on that parting day,
has been recently recovered. On the first volume is inscribed, in
Burns's hand, "And ye shall not swear by My Name falsely, I am the
Lord. Levit. 19th chap. 12th verse;" and on the second volume, "Thou
shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine
oath. Matth. 5th chap. 33rd verse." But the names of Mary Campbell and
Robert Burns, which were originally inscribed on the volumes, have
been almost obliterated. It has been suggested by Mr. Scott Douglas,
the most recent editor who has investigated anew the whole incident,
that, "in the whirl of excitement which soon followed that Sunday,
Burns forgot his vow to poor Mary, and that she, heart-sore at his
neglect, deleted the names from this touching memorial of their secret
betrothal."
Certain it is that in the very next month, June, 1786, we find Burns,
in writing to one of his friends about "poor, ill-advised, ungrateful
Armour," declaring that, "to confess a truth between you and me, I do
still love her to distraction after all, though I won't tell her so if
I were to see her." And Chambers even suggests that there was still a
third love interwoven, at this very time, in the complicated web of
Burns's fickle affections. Burns, though he wrote several poems about
Highland Mary, which afterwards appeared, never mentioned her name to
any of his family. Even, if there was no more in the story than what
has been here given, no wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all
its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of
conscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms the
burden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written three years after. (p. 029)
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid?
Hear'st thou the pangs that rend his breast?
The misery of his condition, about the time when Highland Mary died,
and the conflicting feelings which agitated him, are depicted in the
following extract from a letter which he wrote probably about October,
1786, to his friend Robert Aiken:--
"There are many things that plead strongly against it [seeking a place
in the Excise]: the uncertainty of getting soon into business; the
consequences of my follies, which perhaps make it impracticable for me
to stay at home; and, besides, I have been for some time pining under
secret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know--the pang
of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of
remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, when
attention is not called away by the calls of society or the vagaries
of the Muse. Even in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is the
madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner.
All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these reasons I
have only one answer--the feelings of a father. This, in the present
mood I am in, overbalances everything that can be laid in the scale
against it. You may perhaps think it an extravagant fancy, but it is a
sentiment which strikes home to my very soul; though sceptical in some
points of our current belief, yet I think I have every evidence for
the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence:
if so, then how should I, in the presence of that tremendous Being,
the Author of existence, how should I meet the reproaches of those who
stand to me in the dear relation of children, whom I deserted in (p. 030)
the smiling innocency of helpless infancy? Oh, Thou great unknown
Power! Thou Almighty God! who hast lighted up reason in my breast, and
blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that
order and regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet
Thou hast never left me nor forsaken me...."
* * * * *
"You see, sir, that if to know one's errors were a probability of
mending them, I stand a fair chance; but, according to the reverend
Westminster divines, though conviction must precede conversion, it is
very far from always implying it."
This letter exhibits the tumult of soul in which he had been tossed
during the last six months before it was written. He had by his own
conduct wound round himself complications from which he could not
extricate himself, yet which he could not but poignantly feel. One
cannot read of the "wandering stabs of remorse" of which he speaks,
without thinking of Highland Mary.
Some months before the above letter was written, in the April of the
same year, at the time when he first fell into trouble with Jean
Armour and her father, Burns had resolved to leave his country and
sail for the West Indies. He agreed with a Mr. Douglas to go to
Jamaica and become a book-keeper on his estate there. But how were
funds to be got to pay his passage-money? His friend Gavin Hamilton
suggested that the needed sum might be raised, if he were to publish
by subscription, the poems he had lying in his table-drawer.
Accordingly, in April, the publication of his poems was resolved on.
His friends, Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline, Aiken and Ballantyne of Ayr,
Muir and Parker of Kilmarnock, and others--all did their best to (p. 031)
get the subscription lists quickly filled. The last-named person put
down his own name for thirty-five copies. The printing of them was
committed to John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, and during May,
June, and July of 1786, the work of the press was going forward. In
the interval between the resolution to publish and the appearance of
the poems, during his distraction about Jean Armour's conduct,
followed by the episode of Highland Mary, Burns gave vent to his own
dark feelings in some of the saddest strains that ever fell from
him--the lines on _The Mountain Daisy_, _The Lament_, the Odes to
_Despondency_ and to _Ruin_. And yet so various were his moods, so
versatile his powers, that it was during that same interval that he
composed, in a very different vein, _The Twa Dogs_, and probably also
his satire of _The Holy Fair_. The following is the account the poet
gives of these transactions in the autobiographical sketch of himself
which he communicated to Dr. Moore:--
"I now began to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes.
The first of my poetic offspring that saw light was a burlesque
lamentation of a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists; both of them
were _dramatis personæ_ in my _Holy Fair_. I had a notion myself, that
the piece had some merit; but to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of
it to a friend who was fond of such things, and told him that I could
not guess who was the author of it, but that I thought it pretty
clever. With a certain description of the clergy as well as the laity,
it met with a roar of applause.
"_Holy Willie's Prayer_ next made its appearance, and alarmed the Kirk
Session so much, that they held several meetings to look over their
spiritual artillery, if haply any of it might be pointed against (p. 032)
profane rhymers. Unluckily for me, my wandering led me on another
side, within point-blank shot of their heaviest metal. This is the
unfortunate incident which gave rise to my printed poem, _The Lament_.
This was a most melancholy affair, which I cannot yet bear to reflect
on, and had very nearly given me one or two of the principal
qualifications for a place among those who have lost the chart and
mistaken the reckoning of Rationality.
"I gave up my part of the farm to my brother, and made what little
preparation was in my power for Jamaica. But, before leaving my
native country for ever, I resolved to publish my poems. I weighed my
productions as impartially as was in my power; I thought they had
merit; and it was a delicious idea that I should be called a clever
fellow, even though it should never reach my ears--a poor
negro-driver, or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, and gone
to the world of spirits! I can truly say, that _pauvre inconnu_ as I
then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of my works as I have at
this moment, when the public has decided in their favour....
"I threw off about six hundred copies, of which I got subscriptions
for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly gratified by
the reception I met with from the public; and besides, I pocketed, all
expenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. This sum came very
seasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself, for want of money,
to procure a passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas, the
price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage in
the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for
Hungry ruin had me in the wind.
"I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under (p. 033)
all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised people had uncoupled
the merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the last
farewell of my friends; my chest was on the way to Greenock; I had
composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, '_The
gloomy night is gathering fast_,' when a letter from Dr. Blackwood to
a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening up new prospects
to my poetic ambition."
It was at the close of July while Burns was, according to his own
account, "wandering from one friend's house to another," to avoid the
jail with which he was threatened by Jean Armour's father, that the
volume appeared, containing the immortal poems (1786). That Burns
himself had some true estimate of their real worth is shown by the way
in which he expresses himself in his preface to his volume.
Ushered in with what Lockhart calls, a "modest and manly preface," the
Kilmarnock volume went forth to the world. The fame of it spread at
once like wild-fire throughout Ayrshire and the parts adjacent. This
is the account of its reception given by Robert Heron, a young
literary man, who was at that time living in the Stewartry of
Kirkcudbright:--"Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, learned
or ignorant, were alike delighted, agitated, transported. I was at
that time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire, and I can well
remember how even ploughboys and maid-servants would have gladly
bestowed the wages they earned most hardly, and which they wanted to
purchase necessary clothing, if they might procure the works of
Burns." The edition consisted of six hundred copies--three hundred and
fifty had been subscribed for before publication, and the remainder
seems to have been sold off in about two mouths from their first (p. 034)
appearance. When all expenses were paid, Burns received twenty pounds
as his share of the profits. Small as this sum was, it would have more
than sufficed to convey him to the West Indies; and, accordingly, with
nine pounds of it he took a steerage passage in a vessel which was
expected to sail from Greenock at the beginning of September. But from
one cause or another the day of sailing was postponed, his friends
began to talk of trying to get him a place in the Excise, his fame was
rapidly widening in his own country, and his powers were finding a
response in minds superior to any which he had hitherto known. Up to
this time he had not associated with any persons of a higher grade
than the convivial lawyers of Mauchline and Ayr, and the mundane
ministers of the New Light school. But now persons of every rank were
anxious to become acquainted with the wonderful Ayrshire Ploughman,
for it was by that name he now began to be known, just as in the next
generation another poet of as humble birth was spoken of as The
Ettrick Shepherd. The first persons of a higher order who sought the
acquaintanceship of Burns were Dugald Stewart and Mrs. Dunlop of
Dunlop. The former of these two was the celebrated Scotch metaphysician,
one of the chief ornaments of Edinburgh and its University at the
close of last and the beginning of this century. He happened to be
passing the summer at Catrine, on the Ayr, a few miles from Burns's
farm, and having been made acquainted with the poet's works and
character by Mr. Mackenzie, the surgeon of Mauchline, he invited the
poet and the medical man to dine with him at Catrine. The day of this
meeting was the 23rd of October, only three days after that on which
Highland Mary died. Burns met on that day not only the professor (p. 035)
and his accomplished wife, but for the first time in his life dined
with a live lord--a young nobleman, said to have been of high promise,
Lord Daer, eldest son of the then Earl of Selkirk. He had been a
former pupil of Dugald Stewart, and happened to be at that time his
guest. Burns has left the following humorous record of his own
feelings at that meeting:--
This wot ye all whom it concerns,
I, Rhymer Robin, alias Burns,
October twenty-third,
A ne'er to be forgotten day,
Sae far I sprachled up the brae [clambered],
I dinner'd wi' a Lord.
* * * * *
But wi' a Lord! stand out my shin,
A Lord,--a Peer, an Earl's Son!
Up higher yet my bonnet!
And sic a Lord! lang Scotch ells twa,
Our Peerage he o'erlooks them a',
As I look o'er a sonnet.
But oh for Hogarth's magic power!
To show Sir Bardie's willyart glower [bewildered],
And how he stared and stammered,
When goavan, as if led in branks, [moving stupidly],
And stumpin' on his ploughman shanks,
He in the parlour hammered.
I sidling sheltered in a nook,
An' at his Lordship steal't a look
Like some portentous omen;
Except good sense and social glee,
An' (what surprised me) modesty,
I marked nought uncommon.
I watched the symptoms o' the great,
The gentle pride, the lordly state,
The arrogant assuming;
The fient a pride, nae pride had he,
Nor sauce, nor state, that I could see,
Mair than an honest ploughman.
From this record of that evening given by Burns, it is interesting (p. 036)
to turn to the impression made on Professor Stewart by this their
first interview. He says,--
"His manners were then, as they continued ever afterwards, simple,
manly, and independent; strongly expressive of conscious genius and
worth, but without anything that indicated forwardness, arrogance, or
vanity. He took his share in conversation, but not more than belonged
to him; and listened with apparent attention and deference on subjects
where his want of education deprived him of the means of information.
If there had been a little more of gentleness and accommodation in his
temper, he would, I think, have been still more interesting; but he
had been accustomed to give law in the circle of his ordinary
acquaintance, and his dread of anything approaching to meanness or
servility rendered his manner somewhat decided and hard. Nothing
perhaps was more remarkable among his various attainments than the
fluency, and precision, and originality of his language, when he spoke
in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of
expression, and avoided, more successfully than most Scotchmen, the
peculiarities of Scottish phraseology."
Burns parted with Dugald Stewart, after this evening spent with him in
Ayrshire, to meet him again in the Edinburgh coteries, amid which the
professor shone as a chief light.
Not less important in the history of Burns was his first introduction
to Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, a lady who continued the constant friend of
himself and of his family while she lived. She was said to be a lineal
descendant of the brother of the great hero of Scotland, William
Wallace. Gilbert Burns gives the following account of the way in (p. 037)
which his brother's acquaintance with this lady began.
"Of all the friendships, which Robert acquired in Ayrshire or
elsewhere, none seemed more agreeable to him than that of Mrs. Dunlop
of Dunlop, nor any which has been more uniformly and constantly
exerted in behalf of him and his family, of which, were it proper, I
could give many instances. Robert was on the point of setting out for
Edinburgh before Mrs. Dunlop heard of him. About the time of my
brother's publishing in Kilmarnock, she had been afflicted with a long
and severe illness, which had reduced her mind to the most distressing
state of depression. In this situation, a copy of the printed poems
was laid on her table by a friend; and happening to open on _The
Cotter's Saturday Night_, she read it over with the greatest pleasure
and surprise; the poet's description of the simple cottagers operating
on her mind like the charm of a powerful exorcist, expelling the demon
_ennui_, and restoring her to her wonted inward harmony and
satisfaction. Mrs. Dunlop sent off a person express to Mossgiel,
distant fifteen or sixteen miles, with a very obliging letter to my
brother, desiring him to send her half a dozen copies of his poems, if
he had them to spare, and begging he would do her the pleasure of
calling at Dunlop House as soon as convenient. This was the beginning
of a correspondence which ended only with the poet's life. Nearly the
last use he made with his pen was writing a short letter to this lady
a few days before his death."
The success of the first edition of his poems naturally made Burns
anxious to see a second edition begun. He applied to his Kilmarnock
printer, who refused the venture, unless Burns could supply ready
money to pay for the printing. This he could not do. But the (p. 038)
poems by this time had been read and admired by the most cultivated
men in Edinburgh, and more than one word of encouragement had reached
him from that city. The earliest of these was contained in a letter
from the blind poet, Dr. Blacklock, to whom Mr. Laurie, the kindly and
accomplished minister of Loudoun, had sent the volume. This Mr. Laurie
belonged to the more cultivated section of the Moderate party in the
Church, as it was called, and was the friend of Dr. Hugh Blair,
Principal Robertson, and Dr. Blacklock, and had been the channel
through which Macpherson's fragments of Ossian had first been brought
under the notice of that literary circle, which afterwards introduced
them to the world. The same worthy minister had, on the first
appearance of the poems, made Burns' acquaintance; and had received
him with warm-hearted hospitality. This kindness the poet
acknowledged, on one of his visits to the Manse of Loudoun, by leaving
in the room in which he slept a short poem of six very feeling
stanzas, which contained a prayer for the family. This is the last
stanza,--
When soon or late they reach that coast,
O'er life's rough ocean driven,
May they rejoice, no wanderer lost,
A family in heaven!
As soon as Mr. Laurie received the letter from Dr. Blacklock, written
on the 4th September, in which warm admiration of the Kilmarnock volume
was expressed, he forwarded it to Burns at Mossgiel. The result of it
fell like sunshine on the young poet's heart; for as he says, "The
doctor belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I had not dared
to hope." The next word of approval from Edinburgh was a highly
appreciative criticism of the poems, which appeared in a number (p. 039)
of _The Edinburgh Magazine_ at the beginning of November. Up till this
time Burns had not abandoned his resolution to emigrate to the West
Indies. But the refusal of the Kilmarnock printer to undertake a new
edition, and the voices of encouragement reaching him from Edinburgh,
combining with his natural desire to remain, and be known as a poet,
in his native country, at length made him abandon the thought of
exile. On the 18th November we find him writing to a friend, that he
had determined on Monday or Tuesday, the 27th or 28th November, to set
his face toward the Scottish capital and try his fortune there.
At this stage of the poet's career, Chambers pauses to speculate on
the feelings with which the humble family at Mossgiel would hear of
the sudden blaze of their brother's fame, and of the change it had
made in his prospects. They rejoiced, no doubt, that he was thus
rescued from compulsory banishment, and were no way surprised that the
powers they had long known him to possess had at length won the
world's admiration. If he had fallen into evil courses, none knew it
so well as they, and none had suffered more by these aberrations.
Still, with all his faults, he had always been to them a kind son and
brother, not loved the less for the anxieties he had caused them. But
the pride and satisfaction they felt in his newly-won fame, would be
deep, not demonstrative. For the Burns family were a shy, reserved
race, and like so many of the Scottish peasantry, the more they felt,
the less they would express. In this they were very unlike the poet,
with whom to have a feeling and to express it were almost synonymous.
His mother, though not lacking in admiration of her son, is said to
have been chiefly concerned lest the praises of his genius should make
him forget the Giver of it. Such may have been the feelings of (p. 040)
the poet's family.
What may we imagine his own feeling to have been in this crisis of his
fate? The thought of Edinburgh society would naturally stir that
ambition which was strong within him, and awaken a desire to meet the
men who were praising him in the capital, and to try his powers in
that wider arena. It might be that in that new scene something might
occur which would reverse the current of his fortunes, and set him
free from the crushing poverty that had hitherto kept him down.
Anyhow, he was conscious of strong powers, which fitted him to shine,
not in poetry only, but in conversation and discussion; and, ploughman
though he was, he did not shrink from encountering any man or any set
of men. Proud, too, we know he was, and his pride often showed itself
in jealousy and suspicion of the classes who were socially above him,
until such feelings were melted by kindly intercourse with some
individual man belonging to the suspected orders. He felt himself to
surpass in natural powers those who were his superiors in rank and
fortune, and he could not, for the life of him, see why they should be
full of this world's goods, while he had none of them. He had not yet
learned--he never did learn--that lesson, that the genius he had
received was his allotted and sufficient portion, and that his wisdom
lay in making the most of this rare inward gift, even on a meagre
allowance of the world's external goods. But perhaps, whether he knew
it or not, the greatest attraction of the capital was the secret hope
that in that new excitement he might escape from the demons of remorse
and despair which had for many months been dogging him. He may have
fancied this, but the pangs which Burns had created for himself (p. 041)
were too deep to be in this way permanently put by.
The secret of his settled unhappiness lay in the affections that he
had abused in himself and in others who had trusted him. The course he
had run since his Irvine sojourn was not of a kind to give peace to
him or to any man. A coarse man of the world might have stifled the
tender voices that were reproaching him, and have gone on his way
uncaring that his conduct--
Hardened a' within,
And petrified the feeling.
But Burns could not do this. The heart that had responded so feelingly
to the sufferings of lower creatures, the unhoused mouse, the shivering
cattle, the wounded hare, could not without shame remember the wrongs
he had done to those human beings whose chief fault was that they had
trusted him not wisely but too well. And these suggestions of a
sensitive heart, conscience was at hand to enforce--a conscience
wonderfully clear to discern the right, even when the will was least
able to fulfil it. The excitements of a great city, and the loud
praises of his fellow-men might enable him momentarily to forget, but
could not permanently stifle inward voices like these. So it was with
a heart but ill at ease, bearing dark secrets he could tell to no one,
that Burns passed from his Ayrshire cottage into the applause of the
Scottish capital.