SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH.
These summer and autumn wanderings ended, Burns returned to Edinburgh,
and spent there the next five months from the latter part of October,
1787, till the end of March, 1788, in a way which to any man, much
more to such an one as he, could give small satisfaction. The
ostensible cause of his lingering in Edinburgh was to obtain a
settlement with his procrastinating publisher, Creech, because till
this was effected, he had no money with which to enter on the
contemplated farm, or on any other regular way of life. Probably in
thus wasting his time, Burns may have been influenced more than he
himself was aware, by a secret hope that something might yet be done
for him--that all the smiles lavished on him by the great and powerful
could not possibly mean nothing, and that he should be left to drudge
on in poverty and obscurity as before.
During this winter Burns changed his quarters from Richmond's lodging
in High Street, where he had lived during the former winter, to a
house then marked 2, now 30, St. James's Square in the New Town. There
he lived with a Mr. Cruikshank, a colleague of his friend Nicol in the
High School, and there he continued to reside till he left Edinburgh.
More than once he paid brief visits to Nithsdale, and examined (p. 080)
again and yet again the farm on the Dalswinton property, on which he
had long had his eye. This was his only piece of serious business
during those months. The rest of his time was spent more or less in
the society of his jovial companions. We hear no more during this
second winter of his meetings with literary professors, able advocates
and judges, or fashionable ladies. His associates seem to have been
rather confined to men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp. He would seem
also to have amused himself with flirtations with several young
heroines, whose acquaintance he had made during the previous summer.
The chief of these were two young ladies, Miss Margaret Chalmers and
Miss Charlotte Hamilton, cousins of each other, and relatives of his
Mauchline friend, Gavin Hamilton. These he had met during the two
visits which he paid to Harvieston, on the river Devon, where they
were living for a time. On his return to Edinburgh he continued to
correspond with them both, and to address songs of affection, if not
of love, now to one, now to another. To Charlotte Hamilton he
addressed the song beginning,--
How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon;
To Miss Chalmers, one with the opening lines,--
Where, braving angry winter's storms,
The lofty Ochils rise;
And another beginning thus,--
My Peggy's face, my Peggy's form.
Which of these young ladies was foremost in Burns's affection, it is
not easy now to say, nor does it much signify. To both he wrote some
of his best letters, and some of not his best verses. Allan (p. 081)
Cunningham thinks that he had serious affection for Miss Hamilton. The
latest editor of his works asserts that his heart was set on Miss
Chalmers, and that she, long afterwards in her widowhood, told Thomas
Campbell the poet, that Burns had made a proposal of marriage to her.
However this may be, it is certain that while both admitted him to
friendship, neither encouraged his advances. They were better "advised
than to do so." Probably they knew too much of his past history and
his character to think of him as a husband. Both were soon after this
time married to men more likely to make them happy than the erratic
poet. When they turned a deaf ear to his addresses, he wrote: "My
rhetoric seems to have lost all its effect on the lovely half of
mankind; I have seen the day, but that is a tale of other years. In my
conscience, I believe, that my heart has been so often on fire that it
has been vitrified!" Well perhaps for him if it had been so, such
small power had he to guide it. Just about the time when he found
himself rejected, notwithstanding all his fine letters and his verses,
by the two young ladies on Devon banks, he met with an accident
through the upsetting of a hackney coach by a drunken driver. The fall
left him with a bruised limb, which confined him to his room from the
7th of December till the middle of February (1787).
During these weeks he suffered much from low spirits, and the letters
which he then wrote under the influence of that hypochondria and
despondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent with
himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose
or verse. He describes himself as the "sport, the miserable victim of
rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility,
and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to (p. 082)
die.... I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best.
Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking Resolution; accompany me through
this to me miserable world! I have a hundred times wished that one
could resign life, as an officer resigns a commission; for I would not
take in any poor wretch by selling out. Lately I was a sixpenny
private, and, God knows, a miserable soldier enough; now I march to
the campaign, a starving cadet--a little more conspicuously wretched."
But his late want of success on the banks of Devon, and his consequent
despondency, were alike dispelled from his thoughts by a new
excitement. Just at the time when he met with his accident, he had
made the acquaintance of a certain Mrs. M'Lehose, and acquaintance all
at once became a violent attachment on both sides. This lady had been
deserted by her husband, who had gone to the West Indies, leaving her
in poverty and obscurity to bring up two young boys as best she might.
We are told that she was "of a somewhat voluptuous style of beauty, of
lively and easy manners, of a poetical fabric of mind, with some wit,
and not too high a degree of refinement or delicacy--exactly the kind
of woman to fascinate Burns." Fascinated he certainly was. On the 30th
December he writes; "Almighty love still reigns and revels in my
bosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young
Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than
the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or the poisoned
arrow of the savage African." For several months his visits to her
house were frequent, his letters unremitting. The sentimental
correspondence which they began, in which Burns addresses her as
Clarinda, assuming to himself the name of Sylvander, has been (p. 083)
published separately, and become notorious. Though this correspondence
may contain, as Lockhart says, "passages of deep and noble feeling,
which no one but Burns could have penned," it cannot be denied that it
contains many more of such fustian, such extravagant bombast, as Burns
or any man beyond twenty might well have been ashamed to write. One
could wish that for the poet's sake this correspondence had never been
preserved. It is so humiliating to read this torrent of falsetto
sentiment now, and to think that a man gifted like Burns should have
poured it forth. How far his feelings towards Clarinda were sincere,
or how far they were wrought up to amuse his vacancy by playing at
love-making, it is hard to say. Blended with a profusion of forced
compliments and unreal raptures, there are expressions in Burns's
letters which one cannot but believe that he meant in earnest, at the
moment when he wrote them. Clarinda, it would seem, must have regarded
Burns as a man wholly disengaged, and have looked forward to the
possible removal of Mr. M'Lehose, and with him of the obstacle to a
union with Burns. How far he may have really shared the same hopes it
is impossible to say. We only know that he used again and again
language of deepest devotion, vowing to "love Clarinda to death,
through death, and for ever."
While this correspondence between Sylvander and Clarinda was in its
highest flight of rapture, Burns received, in January or February,
1788, news from Mauchline which greatly agitated him. His renewed
intercourse with Jean Armour had resulted in consequences which again
stirred her father's indignation; this time so powerfully, that he
turned his daughter to the door. Burns provided a shelter for her
under the roof of a friend; but for a time he does not seem to (p. 084)
have thought of doing more than this. Whether he regarded the original
private marriage as entirely dissolved, and looked on himself as an
unmarried man, does not quite appear. Anyhow, he and Clarinda, who
knew all that had passed with regard to Jean Armour, seem to have then
thought that enough had been done for the seemingly discarded
Mauchline damsel, and to have carried on their correspondence as
rapturously as ever for fully another six weeks, until the 21st of
March (1788). On that day Sylvander wrote to Clarinda a final letter,
pledging himself to everlasting love, and following it by a copy of
verses beginning,--
Fair empress of the poet's soul,
presenting her at the same time with a pair of wineglasses as a
parting gift.
On the 24th of March, he turned his back on Edinburgh, and never
returned to it for more than a day's visit.
Before leaving town, however, he had arranged three pieces of business,
all bearing closely on his future life. First, he had secured for
himself an appointment in the Excise through the kindness of "Lang
Sandy Wood," the surgeon who attended him when laid up with a bruised
limb, and who had interceded with Mr. Graham of Fintray, the chief of
the Excise Board, on Burns' behalf. When he received his appointment,
he wrote to Miss Chalmers, "I have chosen this, my dear friend, after
mature deliberation. The question is not at what door of fortune's
palace shall we enter in, but what doors does she open for us. I was
not likely to get anything to do. I got this without hanging-on, or
mortifying solicitation; it is immediate bread, and though poor in
comparison of the last eighteen months of my existence, 'tis (p. 085)
luxury in comparison of all my preceding life."
Next, he had concluded a bargain with Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, to
lease his farm of Ellisland, on which he had long set his heart, and
to which he had paid several visits in order to inspect it.
Lastly, he had at last obtained a business settlement with Creech
regarding the Second Edition of his Poems. Before this was effected,
Burns had more than once lost his temper, and let Creech know his
mind. Various accounts have been given of the profits that now accrued
to Burns from the whole transaction. We cannot be far wrong in taking
the estimate at which Dr. Chambers arrived, for on such a matter he
could speak with authority. He sets down the poet's profits at as
nearly as possible 500_l._ Of this sum Burns gave 180_l._ to his
brother Gilbert, who was now in pecuniary trouble. "I give myself no
airs on this," he writes, "for it was mere selfishness on my part; I
was conscious that the wrong scale of the balance was pretty heavily
charged, and I thought that throwing a little filial piety and
fraternal affection into the scale in my favour, might help to smooth
matters at the grand reckoning." This money was understood by the
family to be the provision due from Robert on behalf of his mother,
the support of whom he was now, that he was setting up for himself,
about to throw on his younger brother. Chambers seems to reckon that
as another 120_l._ must have been spent by Burns on his tours, his
accident, and his sojourn in Edinburgh since October, he could not
have more than 200_l._ over, with which to set up at Ellisland. We see
in what terms Burns had written to Clarinda on the 21st of March. On
his leaving Edinburgh and returning to Ayrshire, he married Jean
Armour, and forthwith acknowledged her in letters as his wife. (p. 086)
This was in April, though it was not till August that he and Jean
appeared before the Kirk-Session, and were formally recognized as man
and wife by the Church.
Whether, in taking this step, Burns thought that he was carrying out a
legal, as well as a moral, obligation, we know not. The interpreters
of the law now assert that the original marriage in 1786 had never
been dissolved, and that the destruction of the promissory lines, and
the temporary disownment of him by Jean and her family, could not in
any way invalidate it. Indeed after all that had happened, for Burns
to have deserted Jean, and married another, even if he legally could
have done so, would have been the basest infidelity. Amid all his
other errors and inconsistencies, and no doubt there were enough of
these, we cannot but be glad for the sake of his good name that he now
acted the part of an honest man, and did what he could to repair the
much suffering and shame he had brought on his frail but faithful
Jean.
As to the reasons which determined Burns to marry Jean Armour, and not
another, this is the account he himself gives when writing to Mrs.
Dunlop, one of his most trusted correspondents, to whom he spoke out
his real heart in a simpler, more natural way, than was usual with him
in letter-writing:--
"You are right that a bachelor state would have ensured me more
friends; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace in
the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in
approaching my God, would seldom have been of the number. I found a
once much-loved, and still much-loved, female, literally and truly
cast out to the mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled her to
purchase a shelter;--there is no sporting with a fellow-creature's (p. 087)
happiness or misery. The most placid good-nature and sweetness of
disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to
love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the
best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure: these I think,
in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read a
page but the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, nor have danced
in a brighter assembly than a penny pay wedding."
To Miss Chalmers he says:--
"I have married my Jean. I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature's
happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle with
so important a deposit, nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have
not got polite tittle-tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I
am not sickened and disquieted with the multiform curse of
boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the
sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in
the country.... A certain late publication of Scots poems she has
perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the country, as she has
the finest wood-note wild I ever heard."
There have been many comments on this turning-point in Burns' life.
Some have given him high praise for it, as though he had done a heroic
thing in voluntarily sacrificing himself, when it might have been open
to him to form a much higher connexion. But all such praise seems
entirely thrown away. It was not, as it appears, open to him to form
any other marriage legally; certainly it was not open to him morally.
The remark of Lockhart is entirely true, that, "had he hesitated to
make her his wife, whom he loved, and who was the mother of his children,
he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian." Lockhart (p. 088)
need hardly have added, "or into that misery of miseries, the remorse
of a poet."
But even had law and morality allowed him to pass by Jean,--which they
did not,--would it have been well for Burns, if he had sought, as one
of his biographers regrets that he had not done, a wife among ladies
of higher rank and more refined manners? That he could appreciate what
these things imply, is evident from his own confession in looking back
on his introduction to what is called society: "A refined and
accomplished woman was a being altogether new to me, and of which I
had formed a very inadequate idea." It requires but little knowledge
of the world and its ways to see the folly of all such regrets. Great
disparity of condition in marriage seldom answers. And in the case of
a wayward, moody man, with the pride, the poverty, and the
irregularities of Burns, and the drudging toil which must needs await
his wife, it is easy to see what misery such a marriage would have
stored up for both. As it was, the marriage he made was, to put it at
the lowest, one of the most prudent acts of his life. Jean proved to
be all, and indeed more than all, he anticipates in the letters above
given. During the eight years of their married life, according to all
testimony, she did her part as a wife and mother with the most patient
and placid fidelity, and bore the trials which her husband's irregular
habits entailed on her, with the utmost long-suffering. And after his
death, during her long widowhood, she revered his memory, and did her
utmost to maintain the honour of his name.
With his marriage to his Ayrshire wife, Burns had bid farewell to
Edinburgh, and to whatever high hopes it may have at anytime kindled
within him, and had returned to a condition somewhat nearer to that
in which he was born. With what feelings did he pass from this (p. 089)
brilliant interlude, and turn the corner which led him back to the
dreary road of commonplace drudgery, which he hoped to have escaped?
There can be little doubt that his feelings were those of bitter
disappointment. There had been, it is said, a marked contrast between
the reception he had met with during his first and second winters in
Edinburgh. As Allan Cunningham says, "On his first appearance the
doors of the nobility opened spontaneously, 'on golden hinges turning,'
and he ate spiced meats and drank rare wines, interchanging nods and
smiles with high dukes and mighty earls. A colder reception awaited
his second coming. The doors of lords and ladies opened with a tardy
courtesy; he was received with a cold and measured stateliness, was
seldom requested to stop, seldomer to repeat his visit; and one of his
companions used to relate with what indignant feeling the poet
recounted his fruitless calls and his uncordial receptions in the good
town of Edinburgh.... He went to Edinburgh strong in the belief that
genius such as his would raise him in society; he returned not without
a sourness of spirit, and a bitterness of feeling."
When he did give vent to his bitterness, it was not into man's, but
into woman's sympathetic ear that he poured his complaint. It is thus
he writes, some time after settling at Ellisland, to Mrs. Dunlop,
showing how fresh was still the wound within. "When I skulk into a
corner lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should
mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, 'What merits has he
had, or what demerit have I had, in some previous state of existence,
that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule,
and the keys of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the
world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?... Often as I (p. 090)
have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, it
has suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the present human
figure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his own
consequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his
common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out a
prospect-glass.'"
This is a feeling which Burns has uttered in many a form of prose and
verse, but which probably never possessed him more bitterly than when
he retired from Edinburgh. Many persons in such circumstances may have
felt thoughts of this kind pass over them for a moment. But they have
felt ashamed of them as they rose, and have at once put them by. Burns
no doubt had a severer trial in this way than most, but he never could
overcome it, never ceased to chafe at that inequality of conditions
which is so strongly fixed in the system in which we find ourselves.
It was natural that he should have felt some bitterness at the changed
countenance which Edinburgh society turned on him, and it is easy to
be sarcastic on the upper ranks of that day for turning it; but were
they really so much to blame? There are many cases under the present
order of things, in which we are constrained to say, "It must needs be
that offences come." Taking men and things as they are, could it well
have been otherwise?
First, the novelty of Burns's advent had worn off by his second winter
in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always counts
for something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men of
Blair's circle knew more of Burns's ways and doings than at first, and
what they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for (p. 091)
intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept that
formidable memorandum-book already alluded to, in which he was
supposed to sketch with unsparing hand, "stern likenesses" of his
friends and benefactors. So little of a secret did he make of this,
that we are told he sometimes allowed a visitor to have a look at the
figures which he had sketched in his portrait-gallery. The knowledge
that such a book existed was not likely to make Blair and his friends
more desirous of his society.
Again, the festivities at the Crochallan Club and other such haunts,
the habits he there indulged in, and the associates with whom he
consorted, these were well known. And it was not possible that either
the ways, the conversation, or the cronies of the Crochallan Club
could be welcomed in quieter and more polished circles. Men of the
Ainslie and Nicol stamp would hardly have been quite in place there.
Again--what is much to the honour of Burns--he never in the highest
access of his fame, abated a jot of his intimacy and friendship
towards the men of his own rank, with whom he had been associated in
his days of obscurity. These were tradesmen, farmers, and peasants.
The thought of them, their sentiments, their prejudices and habits, if
it had been possible, their very persons, he would have taken with
him, without disguise or apology, into the highest circles of rank or
of literature. But this might not be. It was impossible that Burns
could take Mauchline with its belles, its Poosie-Nansies and its
Souter Johnnies, bodily into the library of Dr. Blair or the
drawing-room of Gordon Castle.
A man, to whom it is open, must make his choice; but he cannot live at
once in two different and widely sundered orders of society. To (p. 092)
no one is it given, not even to men of genius great as that of
Burns, for himself and his family entirely to overleap the barriers
with which custom and the world have hedged us in, and to weld the
extremes of society into one. To the speculative as well as to the
practically humane man, the great inequality in human conditions
presents, no doubt, a perplexing problem. A little less worldly pride,
and a little more Christian wisdom and humility, would probably have
helped Burns to solve it better than he did. But besides the social
grievance, which though impalpable is very real, Burns had another
more material and tangible. The great whom he had met in Edinburgh,
whose castles he had visited in the country, might have done something
to raise him at once above poverty and toil, and they did little or
nothing. They had, indeed, subscribed liberally for his Second
Edition, and they had got him a gauger's post, with fifty or sixty
pounds a year, that was all. What more could they, ought they to have
done? To have obtained him an office in some one of the higher
professions was not to be thought of, for a man cannot easily at the
age of eight-and-twenty change his whole line and adapt himself to an
entirely new employment. The one thing they might have combined to do,
was to have compelled Dundas, or some other of the men then in power,
to grant Burns a pension from the public purse. That was the day of
pensions, and hundreds with no claim to compare with Burns's were then
on the pension list: 300_l._ a year would have sufficed to place him
in comfort and independence, and could public money have been better
spent? But though the most rigid economist might not have objected,
would Burns have accepted such a benefaction, had it been offered?
And if he had accepted it, would he not have chafed under the (p. 093)
obligation, more even than he did in the absence of it? Such questions
as these cannot but arise, as often as we think over the fate of
Burns, and ask ourselves, if nothing could have been done to avert it?
Though natural, they are vain. Things hold on their own course to
their inevitable issues, and Burns left Edinburgh, and set his face
first towards Ayrshire, then to Nithsdale, a saddened and embittered
man.