On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the
place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom. In the same set
danced Jean Armour, the master-mason's daughter, and our dark-eyed Don
Juan. His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame,
_caret quia vote sacro_), apparently sensible of some neglect, followed
his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers. Some mirthful
comments followed; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner--or, as I
should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the company at
large--that "he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as
well as his dog." Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on
Mauchline green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog;
and the dog, "scouring in long excursion," scampered with four black
paws across the linen. This brought the two into conversation; when
Jean, with a somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if "he had yet got any
of the lasses to like him as well as his dog?" It is one of the
misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour forbids him to
refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon duty, or like
the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases. Burns accepted the
provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
girl--pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not
averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might
here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth! for this facile and
empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her
heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by
another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
"battering himself into a warm affection"; and the proofs of his success
are to be found in many verses of the period. Nor did he succeed with
himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his
fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became
manifest. It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple. They had
trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life's serious
issues. Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to
expect was marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest
thoughts; she might now be glad if she could get what she would never
have chosen. As for Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised
that his voyage of discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere--that
he was not, and never had been, really in love with Jean. Hear him in
the pressure of the hour. "Against two things," he writes, "I am as
fixed as fate--staying at home, and owning her conjugally. The first,
by heaven, I will not do!--the last, by hell, I will never do!" And then
he adds, perhaps already in a more relenting temper: "If you see Jean,
tell her I will meet her, so God hold me in my hour of need." They met
accordingly; and Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these
heights of independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of
marriage. It is the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually
false positions--relations of life which are wrong in themselves, and
which it is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a
case. Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be
glad that Burns was better counselled by his heart. When we discover
that we can no longer be true, the next best is to be kind. I daresay he
came away from that interview not very content, but with a glorious
conscience; and as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, "How
are Thy servants blest, O Lord!" Jean, on the other hand, armed with her
"lines," confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his
wife. Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves
in their farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do
country lass; and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous
attachment on his daughter's part. At least, he was not so much incensed
by her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to
cover it. Of this he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the
acknowledgment only to appease her parents, and not at all from any
violent inclination to the poet, readily gave up the paper for
destruction; and all parties imagined, although wrongly, that the
marriage was thus dissolved. To a proud man like Burns here was a
crushing blow. The concession which had been wrung from his pity was now
publicly thrown back in his teeth. The Armour family preferred disgrace
to his connection. Since the promise, besides, he had doubtless been
busy "battering himself" back again into his affection for the girl;
and the blow would not only take him in his vanity, but wound him at the
heart.
He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript
poetry was insufficient to console him. He must find a more powerful
remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth
again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love. It is
perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or
confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon
another. The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and
love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor,
insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. There was an innocent and
gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he
had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret
engagement. Jean's marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13,
1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May
14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. They each wet their hands in a
stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as
they vowed eternal faith. Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which
Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding
nature of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the
wandering affections, here were two people united for life. Mary came of
a superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but
they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for
nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his
tottering constancy.
Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet's life. His book
was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment
of the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he
was under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his
wife; now he had "orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard
the _Nancy_, Captain Smith"; now his chest was already on the road to
Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he
measures verses of farewell:--
"The bursting tears my heart declare;
Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!"
But the great Master Dramatist had secretly another intention for the
piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and
birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the
act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought to bed of
twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to
bring up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother. The success
of the book was immediate and emphatic; it put L20 at once into the
author's purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh
and push his success in a second and larger edition. Third and last in
these series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm
for Robert. He went to the window to read it; a sudden change came over
his face, and he left the room without a word. Years afterwards, when
the story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then
learned the death of Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no
reference to this passage of his life; it was an adventure of which, for
I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details. Of one thing
we may be glad: in after years he visited the poor girl's mother, and
left her with the impression that he was "a real warm-hearted chield."
Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for
Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend. The town that winter
was "agog with the ploughman poet." Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair,
"Duchess Gordon and all the gay world," were of his acquaintance. Such
a revolution is not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must
be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early
boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement
seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the
furrow, wielding "the thresher's weary flingin'-tree"; and his
education, his diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scots
countryman. Now he stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned.
We can see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat
and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday
best; the heavy ploughman's figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his
face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of
thought, and his large dark eye "literally glowing" as he spoke. "I
never saw such another eye in a human head," says Walter Scott, "though
I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." With men, whether
they were lords or omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified,
and free from bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the
social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not
embarrassed in this society, because he read and judged the men; he
could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and, as for the critics, he
dismissed their system in an epigram. "These gentlemen," said he,
"remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine
that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand,
surprised him; he was scarce commander of himself in their society; he
was disqualified by his acquired nature as a Don Juan; and he, who had
been so much at his ease with country lasses, treated the town dames to
an extreme of deference. One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers
a speaking sketch of his demeanour. "His manners were not
prepossessing--scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if
he affected a rusticity or _landertness_, so that when he said the music
was 'bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child." These
would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree of intimacy
the affectation would grow less. And his talk to women had always "a
turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the attention
particularly."
The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well
to Burns from first to last. Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in
similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect
neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help. Although Burns was only a
peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made
welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal of good advice,
helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as
soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise. Burns, on his part, bore the
elevation with perfect dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when
the time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense
never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh
popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day. He wrote a few
letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he
suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he
never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he
was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the
acquaintance were a duke. He would be a bold man who should promise
similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances. It was, in short, an
admirable appearance on the stage of life--socially successful,
intimately self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.
In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we
return to Burns's love affairs. Even on the road to Edinburgh he had
seized upon the opportunity of a flirtation, and had carried the
"battering" so far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal
two days with this anonymous fair one. The exact importance to Burns of
this affair may be gathered from the song in which he commemorated its
occurrence. "I love the dear lassie," he sings, "because she loves me";
or, in the tongue of prose: "Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate
to profit by it; and even now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to
profit by it again." A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man.
Meantime, early in the winter, and only once, we find him regretting
Jean in his correspondence. "Because"--such is his reason--"because he
does not think he will ever meet so delicious an armful again"; and
then, after a brief excursion into verse, he goes straight on to
describe a new episode in the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a
Lothian farmer for a heroine. I must ask the reader to follow all these
references to his future wife; they are essential to the comprehension
of Burns's character and fate. In June we find him back at Mauchline, a
famous man. There, the Armour family greeted him with a "mean, servile
compliance," which increased his former disgust. Jean was not less
compliant; a second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of
the man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted
little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took advantage of her
weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, and with a
heart absolutely indifferent. Judge of this by a letter written some
twenty days after his return--a letter to my mind among the most
degrading in the whole collection--a letter which seems to have been
inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. "I am afraid," it goes, "I
have almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my former
happiness--the eternal propensity I always had to fall in love. My heart
no more glows with feverish rapture; I have no paradisiacal evening
interviews." Even the process of "battering" has failed him, you
perceive. Still he had some one in his eye--a lady, if you please, with
a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had "seen the politest
quarters in Europe." "I frequently visited her," he writes, "and after
passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant formal
bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless
way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after her
return to ----, I wrote her in the same terms. Miss, construing my
remarks farther than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote
me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I
had to travel before I could reach the climate of her favours. But I am
an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my
foot, like Corporal Trim's hat." I avow a carnal longing, after this
transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears. There is little
question that to this lady he must have repeated his addresses, and that
he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,
rejected. One more detail to characterise the period. Six months after
the date of this letter, Burns, back to Edinburgh, is served with a writ
_in meditatione fugae_, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of
humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family.
About the beginning of December (1787) a new period opens in the story
of the poet's random affections. He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes
M'Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two
children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband. She had wit, could
use her pen, and had read "Werther" with attention. Sociable, and even
somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable,
but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties. Of what biographers
refer to daintily as "her somewhat voluptuous style of beauty," judging
from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas's invaluable edition, the
reader will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her for all in
all, I believe she was the best woman Burns encountered. The pair took a
fancy for each other on the spot; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited
him to tea; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a
_tete-a-tete_, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and
this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence. It was
begun in simple sport; they are already at their fifth or sixth
exchange, when Clarinda writes: "It is really curious so much _fun_
passing between two persons who saw each other only _once_"; but it is
hardly safe for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write
almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms
too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance. The
exercise partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be
apprehended when next they meet. It is difficult to give any account of
this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps
not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is
baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura
passages, into downright truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous
sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress
with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by
the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
"Oh, Clarinda", writes Burns, "shall we not meet in a state--some yet
unknown state--of being, where the lavish hand of plenty shall minister
to the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of
Prudence shall never blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?" The
design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a
Bird of Paradise. It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely
making fun of each other as they write. Religion, poetry, love, and
charming sensibility, are the current topics. "I am delighted, charming
Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion," writes Burns; and
the pair entertained a fiction that this was their "favourite subject."
"This is Sunday," writes the lady, "and not a word on our favourite
subject. O fy! 'divine Clarinda!'" I suspect, although quite
unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemption,
they but used the favourite subject as a stalking-horse. In the
meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine
passion. Visits took place, and then became frequent. Clarinda's friends
were hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself had
smart attacks of conscience; but her heart had gone from her control; it
was altogether his, and she "counted all things but loss--heaven
excepted--that she might win and keep him." Burns himself was
transported while in her neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat
rapidly declined during an absence. I am tempted to imagine that,
womanlike, he took on the colour of his mistress's feeling; that he
could not but heat himself at the fire of her unaffected passion; but
that, like one who should leave the hearth upon a winter's night, his
temperature soon fell when he was out of sight, and in a word, though he
could share the symptoms, that he had never shared the disease. At the
same time, amid the fustian of the letters there are forcible and true
expressions, and the love-verses that he wrote upon Clarinda are among
the most moving in the language.
We are approaching the solution. In mid-winter, Jean, once more in the
family way, was turned out of doors by her family; and Burns had her
received and cared for in the house of a friend. For he remained to the
last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister
courage to desert his victim. About the middle of February (1788), he
had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the
south-west on business. Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son.
They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour. Burns, too late
for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not
have to wait. Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful
simplicity: "I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and
there's a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a
little. Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday. She once named you, which
kept me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass of ale--as
the lasses do at Hallowe'en--'in to mysel'.'" Arrived at Mauchline,
Burns installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour
to promise her help and countenance in the approaching confinement. This
was kind at least; but hear his expressions: "I have taken her a room; I
have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
her a guinea.... I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any
claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she
had such a claim--which she has not, neither during my life nor after my
death. She did all this like a good girl." And then he took advantage of
the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for a
certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her"; and he
accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
fawning." This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he
was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes,
your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind them. I will
take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare
away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you." Again, on the
21st: "Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
through death, and for ever?... How rich am I to have such a treasure as
you!... 'The Lord God knoweth,' and, perhaps, 'Israel he shall know,' my
love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember you in my
prayers." By the 7th of April, seventeen days later, he had already
decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.
A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct
is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns,
to whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and
self-respect. This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but
there is no doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a
sincere determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a
loan of a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor
girl whom he had ruined? It was true he could not do as he did without
brutally wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault;
he was, as he truly says, "damned with a choice only of different
species of error and misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept
the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead
a man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been
strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
stands among changing events without foundation or resource.[3]