THE KILMARNOCK EDITION
_The Holy Tulzie_ had been written probably in April 1785, and the
greatest of the satires, _The Holy Fair_, is dated August of the same
year. It may, however, have been only drafted, and partly written, when
the recent celebration of the sacrament at Mauchline was fresh in the
poet's mind. At the very latest, it must have been taken up, completed,
and perfected, in the early months of 1786. That is a period of some ten
months between the first and the last of this series of satires; and
during that time he had composed _Holy Willie's Prayer_, _The Address to
the Deil_, _The Ordination_, and _The Address to the Unco Guid_. But
this represents a very small part of the poetry written by Burns during
this busy period. From the spring of 1785 on to the autumn of 1786 was a
time of great productiveness in his life, a productiveness unparalleled
in the life of any other poet. If, according to Gilbert, the seven years
of their stay at Lochlea were not marked by much literary improvement in
his brother, we take it that the poet had been 'lying fallow' all those
years; and what a rich harvest do we have now! Here, indeed, was a
reward worth waiting for. To read over the names of the poems, songs,
and epistles written within such a short space of time amazes us. And
there is hardly a poem in the whole collection without a claim to
literary excellence. A month or two previous to the composition of his
first satire he had written what Gilbert calls his first poem, _The
Epistle to Davie_, 'a brother poet, lover, ploughman, and fiddler.' It
is worthy of notice that, in the opening lines of this poem--
'While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw,
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,
And hing us ower the ingle'--
we see the poet and his surroundings, as he sets himself down to write.
He plunges, as Horace advises, in _medias res_, and we have the
atmosphere of the poem in the first phrase. This is Burns's usual way of
beginning his poems and epistles, as well as a great many of his songs.
The metre of this poem Burns has evidently taken from _The Cherry and
the Slae_, by Alexander Montgomery, which he must have read in Ramsay's
_Evergreen_. The stanza is rather complicated, although Burns, with his
extraordinary command and pliancy of language, uses it from the first
with masterly ease. But there is much more than mere jugglery of words
in the poem. Indeed, such is this poet's seeming simplicity of speech
that his masterly manipulation of metres always comes as an
afterthought. It never disturbs us in our first reading of the poem.
Gilbert's opinion of this poem is worth recording, the more especially
as he expressly tells us that the first idea of Robert's becoming an
author was started on this occasion. 'I thought it,' he says, 'at least
equal to, if not superior, to many of Allan Ramsay's epistles, and that
the merit of these and much other Scottish poetry seemed to consist
principally in the knack of the expression; but here there was a strain
of interesting sentiment, and the Scotticism of the language scarcely
seemed affected, but appeared to be the natural language of the poet.'
It startles us to hear Gilbert talking thus of the Scotticism, after
having heard so much of Robert Burns writing naturally in the speech of
his home and county. In this poem we have, at least, the first proof of
that graphic power in which Burns has never been excelled, and in it we
have the earliest mention of his Bonnie Jean. In his next poem, _Death
and Dr. Hornbook_, his command of language and artistic phrasing are
more apparent, while pawky humour and genial satire sparkle and flash
from every line. The poem is written in that form of verse which Burns
has made particularly his own. He had become acquainted with it, it is
most likely, in the writings of Fergusson, Ramsay, and Gilbertfield, who
had used it chiefly for comic subjects; but Burns showed that, in his
hands at least, it could be made the vehicle of the most pensive and
tender feeling. In an interesting note to the _Centenary Burns_, edited
by Henley and Henderson, it is pointed out that 'the six-line stave in
rime couee built on two rhymes,' was used by the Troubadours in their
_Chansons de Gestes_, and that it dates at the very latest from the
eleventh century. Burns's happiest use of it was in those epistles which
about this time he began to dash off to some of his friends; and it is
with these epistles that the uninterrupted stream of poetry of this
season may be said properly to begin. Perhaps it was in the use of this
stanza that Burns first discovered his command of rhymes and his
felicity of phrasing. Certain it is, that after his first epistle to
Lapraik, we have epistles, poems, songs, satires flowing from his pen,
uninterrupted for a period, and apparently with marvellous ease. It has
to be remembered, too, that he was now inspired by the dream of becoming
an author--in print. When or where or how, had not been determined; but
the idea was delightful all the same; the hope was inspiration itself.
Some day his work would be published, and he would be read and talked
about! He would have done something for poor auld Scotland's sake. The
one thing now was to make the book, and to that he set himself
deliberately. Poetry was at last to have its chance. Farming had been
tried, with little success. The crops of 1784 had been a failure, and
this year they were hardly more promising. In these discouraging
circumstances the poet was naturally driven in upon himself. His eyes
were turned _ad intra_, and he sought consolation in his Muse. He was
conscious of some poetical ability, and he knew that his compositions
were not destitute of merit. Poetry, too, was to him, and particularly
so at this time, its own exceeding great reward. He rhymed 'for fun';
and probably he was finding in the exercise that excitement his
passionate nature craved. Herein was his stimulant after the routine of
farm-work--spiritless work that was little better than slavery,
incessant and achieving nothing. We can imagine him in those days
returning from the fields, 'forjesket, sair, with weary legs,' and
becoming buoyant as soon as he has opened the drawer of that small deal
table in the garret.
'Leeze me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure,
My chief, amaist, my only pleasure;
At hame, afield, at wark or leisure,
The Muse, poor hizzie,
Though rough and raploch be her measure,
She's seldom lazy.'
But, lazy or not, she becomes 'ramfeezled' with constant work, when he
vows if 'the thowless jad winna mak it clink,' to prose it,--a terrible
threat. For he must write, though it be but to keep despondency at arm's
length. Yet it had become more than a pleasure and a recreation to him;
and this he was beginning to understand. This, after all, was his real
work, not the drudgery of the fields; in it he must live his life, and
fulfil his mission. The more he wrote the more he accustomed himself
with the idea of being an author. He knew that the critic-folk, deep
read in books, might scoff at the very suggestion of a ploughman turning
poet, but he recognised also that they might be wrong. It was not by
dint of Greek that Parnassus was to be climbed. 'Ae spark o' Nature's
fire' was the one thing needful for poetry that was to touch the heart.
'The star that rules my luckless lot,
Has fated me the russet coat,
And damned my fortune to the groat;
But, in requit,
Has blest me with a random shot
O' countra wit.
This while my notion's ta'en a sklent,
To try my fate in guid, black prent;
But still the mair I'm that way bent,
Something cries, "Hoolie!
I red you, honest man, tak tent!
Ye'll shaw your folly.
"There's ither poets, much your betters,
Far seen in Greek, deep men o' letters,
Hae thought they had ensured their debtors,
A' future ages;
Now moths deform in shapeless tatters
Their unknown pages."'
The works of such scholars enjoyed of the moths! There is gentle satire
here. They themselves had grubbed on Greek, and now is Time avenged.
It is in his epistles that we see Burns most vividly and clearly, the
man in all his moods. They are just such letters as might be written to
intimate friends when one is not afraid of being himself, and can speak
freely. In sentiment they are candid and sincere, and in language
transparently unaffected. Whatever occurs to him as he writes goes down;
we have the thoughts of his heart at the time of writing, and see the
varying expressions of his face as he passes from grave to gay, from
lively to severe. Now he is tender, now indignant; now rattling along in
good-natured raillery without broadening into burlesque; now becoming
serious and pensively philosophic without a suggestion of mawkish
morality. For Burns, when he is himself, is always an artist; says his
say, and lets the moral take care of itself; and in his epistles he lets
himself go in a very revelry of artistic abandon. He does not think of
style--that fetich of barren minds--and style comes to him; for style is
a coquette that flies the suppliant wooer to kiss the feet of him who
worships a goddess; a submissive handmaiden, a wayward and moody
mistress. But along with delicacy of diction, force and felicity of
expression, pregnancy of phrase and pliancy of language, what knowledge
there is of men--the passions that sway, the impulses that prompt, the
motives that move them to action. Clearness of vision and accuracy of
observation are evidenced in their vividness of imagery; naturalness and
truthfulness--the first essential of all good writing--in their
convincing sincerity of sentiment. Wit and humour, play and sparkle of
fancy, satire genial or scathing, a boundless love of nature and all
created things, are harmoniously unified in the glowing imagination of
the poet, and welded into the perfect poem. Behind all is the
personality of the writer, captivating the reader as much by his
kindliness and sympathy as by his witchery of words. Others have
attempted poetic epistles, but none has touched familiar intercourse to
such fine issues; none has written with such natural grace or woven the
warp and woof of word and sentiment so cunningly into the web of poetry
as Robert Burns. Looseness of rhythm may be detected, excruciating
rhymes are not awanting, but all are forgiven and forgotten in the
enjoyment of the feast as a whole.
Besides the satires and epistles we have during this fertile period
poems as different in subject, sentiment, and treatment as _The Cotter's
Saturday Night_ and _The Jolly Beggars_; _Hallowe'en_ and _The Mountain
Daisy_; _The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare Maggie_ and _The Twa
Dogs_; _Address to a Mouse_, _Man was made to Mourn_, _The Vision_, _A
Winter's Night_, and _The Epistle to a Young Friend_. Perhaps of all
these poems _The Vision_ is the most important. It is an epoch-marking
poem in the poet's life. All that he had previously written had been
leading to this; the finer the poem the more surely was it bringing him
to this composition. The time was bound to come when he had to settle
for himself finally and firmly what his work in life was to be. Was
poetry to be merely a pastime; a recreation after the labours of the day
were done; a solace when harvests failed and ruin stared the family in
the face? That question Burns answered when he sat down by the
ingle-cheek, and, looking backward, mused on the years of youth that had
been spent 'in stringing blethers up in rhyme for fools to sing.' He saw
what he might have been; he knew too well what he was--'half-mad,
half-fed, half-sarket.' Yet the picture of what he might have been he
dismissed lightly, almost disdainfully; for he saw what he might be
yet--what he should be. Turning from the toilsome past and the
unpromising present, he looked to the future with a manly assurance of
better things. He should shine in his humble sphere, a rustic bard; his
to
'Preserve the dignity of Man,
With soul erect;
And trust, the Universal Plan
Will all protect.'
The poem is pitched on a high key; the keynote is struck in the opening
lines, and the verses move to the end with stateliness and dignity. It
is calm, contemplative, with that artistic restraint that comes of
conscious power. Burns took himself seriously, and knew that if he were
true to his genius he would become the poet and prophet of his
fellow-men.
It is worth while dwelling a little on this particular poem, because it
marks a crisis in Burns's life. At this point he shook himself free from
the tyranny of the soil. He had considered all things, and his
resolution for authorship was taken. Some of the other poems will be
mentioned afterwards; meantime we have to consider another crisis in his
life--some aspects of his nature less pleasing, some episodes in his
career dark and unlovely.
Speaking of the effect _Holy Willie's Prayer_ had on the kirk-session,
he says that they actually held three meetings to see if their holy
artillery could be pointed against profane rhymers. 'Unluckily for me,'
he adds, 'my idle wanderings led me on another side, point-blank within
reach of their heaviest metal. This is the unfortunate story alluded to
in my printed poem _The Lament_. 'Twas a shocking affair, which I cannot
yet bear to recollect, and it had very nearly given me one or two of the
principal qualifications for a place with those who have lost the chart
and mistaken the reckoning of rationality.'
Throughout the year 1785 Burns had been acquainted with Jean Armour, the
daughter of a master mason in Mauchline. Her name, besides being
mentioned in his _Epistle to Davie_, is mentioned in _The Vision_, and
we know from a verse on the six belles of Mauchline that 'Armour was the
jewel o' them a'.' From the depressing cares and anxieties of that
gloomy season the poet had turned to seek solace in song, but he had
also found comfort and consolation in love.
'When heart-corroding care and grief
Deprive my soul of rest,
Her dear idea brings relief
And solace to my breast.'
Now in the spring of 1786 Burns as a man of honour must acknowledge Jean
as his wife. The lovers had imprudently anticipated the Church's
sanction to marriage, and it was his duty, speaking in the homely phrase
of the Scottish peasantry, to make an honest woman of his Bonnie Jean.
But, unfortunately, matters had been going from bad to worse on the farm
of Mossgiel, and about this time the brothers had come to a final
decision to quit the farm. Robert, as Gilbert informs us, durst not then
engage with a family in his poor, unsettled state, but was anxious to
shield his partner by every means in his power from the consequences of
their imprudence. It was agreed, therefore, between them, that they
should make a legal acknowledgment of marriage, that he should go to
Jamaica to push his fortune, and that she should remain with her father
till it should please Providence to put the means of supporting a family
in his power. He was willing even to work as a common labourer so that
he might do his duty by the woman he had already made his wife. But
Jean's father, whatever were his reasons, would allow her to have
nothing whatever to do with a man like Burns. A husband in Jamaica was,
in his judgment, no husband at all. What inducement he held out, or what
arguments he used, we may not know, but he prevailed on Jean to
surrender to him the paper acknowledging the irregular marriage. This he
deposited with Mr. Aitken of Ayr, who, as Burns heard, deleted the
names, thus rendering the marriage null and void. This was the
circumstance, what he regarded as Jean's desertion, which brought Burns,
as he has said, to the verge of insanity.
Now it was that he finally resolved to leave the country. It was not the
first time he had thought of America. Poverty, before this, had led him
to think of emigrating; the success of others who had gone out as
settlers tempted him to try his fortune beyond the seas, even though he
'should herd the buckskin kye in Virginia.' Now, imprudence as well as
poverty urged him, while, wounded so sorely by the action of the
Armours both in his love and his vanity, he had little desire to remain
at home. There is no doubt that, prior to the birth of his twin children
and the publication of his poems, he would have quitted Scotland with
little reluctance. But he was so poor that, even after accepting a
situation in Jamaica, he had not money to pay his passage; and it was at
the suggestion of Gavin Hamilton that he began seriously to prepare for
the publication of his poems by subscription, in order to raise a sum
sufficient to buy his banishment. Accordingly we find him under the date
April 3, 1786, writing to Mr. Aitken, 'My proposals for publishing I am
just going to send to press.'
But what a time this was in the poet's life! It was a long tumult of
hope and despair, exultation and despondency, poetry and love; revelry,
rebellion, and remorse. Everything was excitement; calmness itself a
fever. Yet through it all inspiration was ever with him, and poem
followed poem with miraculous, one might almost say, unnatural rapidity.
Now he is apostrophising Ruin; now he is wallowing in the mire of
village scandal; now he is addressing a mountain daisy in words of
tenderness and purity; now he is scarifying a garrulous tailor, and
ranting with an alien flippancy; now it is Beelzebub he addresses, now
the King; now he is waxing eloquent on the virtues of Scotch whisky,
anon writing to a young friend in words of wisdom that might well be
written on the fly-leaf of his Bible.
This was certainly a period of ageing activity in Burns's life. It
seemed as if there had been a conspiracy of fate and circumstance to
herald the birth of his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and
travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of a play that had all
the makings of a farce and all the elements of a tragedy. There were
endless complications and daily developments, all deepening the dramatic
intensity without disturbing the unity. We watch with breathless
interest, dumbly wondering what the end will be. It is tragedy, comedy,
melodrama, and burlesque all in one.
Driven almost to madness by the faithlessness of Jean Armour, he rends
himself in a whirlwind of passion, and seeks sympathy and solace in the
love of Mary Campbell. What a situation for a novelist! This is just how
the story-teller would have made his jilted hero act; sent him with
bleeding heart to seek consolation in a new love. For novelists make a
study of the vagaries of love, and know that hearts are caught in the
rebound.
Most of the biographers of Burns are agreed that this Highland lassie
was the object of by far the deepest passion he ever knew. They may be
right. Death stepped in before disillusion, and she was never other than
the adored Mary of that rapturous meeting when the white
hawthorn-blossom no purer was than their love. Thus was his love for
Mary Campbell ever a holy and spiritual devotion. Auguste Angellier
says: 'This was the purest, the most lasting, and by far the noblest of
his loves. Above all the others, many of which were more passionate,
this one stands out with the chasteness of a lily. There is a complete
contrast between his love for Jean and his love for Mary. In the one
case all the epithets are material; here they are all moral. The praises
are borrowed, not from the graces of the body, but from the features of
the soul. The words which occur again and again are those of honour, of
purity, of goodness. The idea of seeing her again some day was never
absent from his mind. Every time he thought of eternity, of a future
life, of reunions in some unknown state, it was to her that his heart
went out. The love of that second Sunday of May was ever present. It was
the love which led Burns to the most elevated sphere to which he ever
attained; it was the inspiration of his most spiritual efforts. This
sweet, blue-eyed Highland lassie was his Beatrice, and waved to him from
the gates of heaven.'
We know little about Mary Campbell from the poet himself; and though
much has been ferreted out about her by a host of snappers-up of
unconsidered trifles, this episode in his life is still involved in
mystery. It is pleasant to reflect that his reticence here has kept at
least one love passage in his life sacred and holy. Is not mystery half
the charm and beauty of love? Yet, in spite of his silence, or probably
because of it, details have been raked up from time to time, some grey
and colourless fossil-remains of what was once fresh and living fact.
From Burns himself we know that the lovers took a tender farewell in a
sequestered spot by the banks of the Ayr, and parted never to meet
again. All the romance and tragedy are there, and what need we more? We
are not even certain as to either the place or the date of her death.
Mrs. Begg, the poet's sister, knew little or nothing about Mary
Campbell. She remembered, however, a letter being handed in to him
after the work of the season was over. 'He went to the window to open
and read it, and she was struck by the look of agony which was the
consequence. He went out without uttering a word.' What he felt he
expressed afterwards in song--song that has become the language of
bereaved and broken hearts for all time. The widowed lover knows 'the
dear departed shade,' but he may not have heard of Mary Campbell.
It was in May that Burns and Highland Mary had parted; in June he wrote
to a friend about ungrateful Armour, confessing that he still loved her
to distraction, though he would not tell her so. But all his letters
about this time are wild and rebellious. He raves in a tempest of
passion, and cools himself again, perhaps in the composition of a song
or poem. Just about the time this letter was written, his poems were
already in the press. His proposal for publishing had met with so hearty
a reception, that success financially was to a certain extent assured,
and the printing had been put into the hand of John Wilson, Kilmarnock.
Even yet his pen was busy. He wrote often in a gay and lively style,
almost, it would seem, in a struggle to keep himself from sinking into
melancholy, 'singing to keep his courage up.' His gaiety was 'the
madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner.'
_A Bard's Epitaph_, however, among the many pieces of this season, is
earnest and serious enough to disarm hostile criticism; and his loose
and flippant productions are read leniently in the light of this
pathetic confession. It is a self-revelation truly, but it is honest,
straightforward, and manly. There is nothing plaintive or mawkish about
it.
We next find Burns flying from home to escape legal measures that Jean
Armour's father was instituting against him. He was in hiding at
Kilmarnock to be out of the way of legal diligence, and it was in such
circumstances that he saw his poems through the press. Surely never
before in the history of literature had book burst from such a medley of
misfortunes into so sudden and certain fame. Born in tumult, it
vindicated its volcanic birth, and took the hearts of men by storm.
Burns says little about those months of labour and bitterness. We know
that he had then nearly as high an idea of himself and his works as he
had in later life; he had watched every means of information as to how
much ground he occupied as a man and a poet, and was sure his poems
would meet with some applause. He had subscriptions for about three
hundred and fifty, and he got six hundred copies printed, pocketing,
after all expenses were paid, nearly twenty pounds. With nine guineas of
this sum he bespoke a passage in the first ship that was to sail for the
West Indies. 'I had for some time,' he says, 'been skulking from covert
to covert under all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised,
ungrateful people had uncoupled the merciless, legal pack at my heels. I
had taken the last farewell of my friends; my chest was on the road to
Greenock; I had composed the song _The Gloomy Night is Gathering Fast_,
which was to be the last effort of my muse in Caledonia, when a letter
from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by
rousing my poetic ambition. The doctor belonged to a class of critics,
for whose applause I had not even dared to hope. His idea that I would
meet with every encouragement for a second edition fired me so much,
that away I posted to Edinburgh, without a single acquaintance in town,
or a single letter of recommendation in my pocket.'
It was towards the end of July that the poems were published, and they
met with a success that must have been gratifying to those friends who
had stood by the poet in his hour of adversity, and done what they could
to ensure subscriptions. In spite of the fact that Burns certainly
looked upon himself as possessed of some poetic abilities, the reception
the little volume met with, and the impression it at once made, must
have exceeded his wildest anticipations. Even yet, however, he did not
relinquish the idea of going to America. On the other hand, as we have
seen, the first use he made of the money which publication had brought
him, was to secure a berth in a vessel bound for Jamaica. But he was
still compelled by the dramatic uncertainty of circumstance. The day of
sailing was postponed, else had he certainly left his native land. It
was only after Jean Armour had become the mother of twin children that
there was any hint of diffidence about sailing. In a letter to Robert
Aitken, written in October, he says: 'All these reasons urge me to go
abroad, and to all these reasons I have one answer--the feelings of a
father. That in the present mood I am in overbalances everything that
can be laid in the scale against it.'
His friends, too, after the success of his poems, were beginning to be
doubtful about the wisdom of his going abroad, and were doing what they
could to secure for him a place in the Excise. For his fame had gone
beyond the bounds of his native county, and others than people in his
own station had recognised his genius. Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop was one of
the first to seek the poet's acquaintance, and she became an almost
lifelong friend; through his poems he renewed acquaintance with Mrs.
Stewart of Stair. He was 'roosed' by Craigen-Gillan; Dugald Stewart, the
celebrated metaphysician, and one of the best-known names in the learned
and literary circles of Edinburgh, who happened to be spending his
vacation at Catrine, not very far from Mossgiel, invited the poet to
dine with him, and on that occasion he 'dinnered wi' a laird'--Lord
Daer. Then came the appreciative letter from Dr. Blacklock to the Rev.
George Lawrie of Loudon, already mentioned. Even this letter might not
have proved strong enough to detain him in Scotland, had it not been
that he was disappointed of a second edition of his poems in Kilmarnock.
Other encouragement came from Edinburgh in a very favourable criticism
of his poems in the _Edinburgh Magazine_. This, taken along with Dr.
Blacklock's suggestion about 'a second edition more numerous than the
former,' led the poet to believe that his work would be taken up by any
of the Edinburgh publishers. The feelings of a father also urged him to
remain in Scotland; and at length--probably in November--the thought of
exile was abandoned. It was with very different feelings, we may be
sure, that he contemplated setting out from Mossgiel to sojourn for a
season in Edinburgh--a name that had ever been associated in his mind
with the best traditions of learning and literature in Scotland.