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