ELLISLAND
When Burns turned his back on Edinburgh in February 1788, and set his
face resolutely towards his native county and the work that awaited him,
he left the city a happier and healthier man than he had been all the
months of his sojourn in it. The times of aimless roving, and of still
more demoralising hanging on in the hope of something being done for
him, were at an end; he looked to the future with self-reliance. His
vain hopes of preferment were already 'thrown behind and far away,' and
he saw clearly that by the labour of his own hands he had to live,
independent of the dispensations of patronage, and trusting no longer to
the accidents of fortune. 'The thoughts of a home,' to quote
Cunningham's words, 'of a settled purpose in life, gave him a silent
gladness of heart such as he had never before known.'
Burns, though he had hoped and was disappointed, left the city not so
much with bitterness as with contempt. If he had been received on this
second visit with punctilious politeness, more ceremoniously than
cordially, it was just as he had himself expected. Gossip, too, had been
busy while he was absent, and his sayings and doings had been bruited
abroad. His worst fault was that he was a shrewd observer of men, and
drew, in a memorandum book he kept, pen-portraits of the people he met.
'Dr Blair is merely an astonishing proof of what industry and
application can do. Natural parts like his are frequently to be met
with; his vanity is proverbially known among his acquaintance.' The Lord
Advocate he pictured in a verse:
'He clenched his pamphlets in his fist,
He quoted and he hinted,
Till in a declamation-mist,
His argument he tint it.
He gap'd for't, he grap'd for't,
He fand it was awa, man;
But what his common sense came short,
He eked it out wi' law, man.'
Had pen-portraits, such as these, been merely caricatures, they might
have been forgiven; but, unfortunately, they were convincing likenesses,
therefore libels. We doubt not, as Cunningham tells us, that the
_literati_ of Edinburgh were not displeased when such a man left them;
they could never feel at their ease so long as he was in their midst.
'Nor were the titled part of the community without their share in this
silent rejoicing; his presence was a reproach to them. The illustrious
of his native land, from whom he had looked for patronage, had proved
that they had the carcass of greatness, but wanted the soul; they
subscribed for his poems, and looked on their generosity "as an alms
could keep a god alive." He turned his back on Edinburgh, and from that
time forward scarcely counted that man his friend who spoke of titled
persons in his presence.'
It was with feelings of relief, also, that Burns left the
super-scholarly litterateurs; 'white curd of asses' milk,' he called
them; gentlemen who reminded him of some spinsters in his country who
'spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.' To
such men, recognising only the culture of schools, a genius like Burns
was a puzzle, easier dismissed than solved. Burns saw them, in all their
tinsel of academic tradition, through and through.
Coming from Edinburgh to the quiet home-life of Mossgiel was like coming
out of the vitiated atmosphere of a ballroom into the pure and bracing
air of early morning. Away from the fever of city life, he only
gradually comes back to sanity and health. The artificialities and
affectations of polite society are not to be thrown off in a day's time.
Hardly had he arrived at Mauchline before he penned a letter to
Clarinda, that simply staggers the reader with the shameless and
heartless way in which it speaks of Jean Armour. 'I am dissatisfied with
her--I cannot endure her! I, while my heart smote me for the profanity,
tried to compare her with my Clarinda. 'Twas setting the expiring
glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian
sun. _Here_ was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
fawning; _there_, polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most
generous, the most delicate, the most tender passion. I have done with
her, and she with me.'
Poor Jean! Think of her too confiding and trustful love written down
_mercenary fawning_! But this was not Burns. The whole letter is false
and vulgar. Perhaps he thought to please his Clarinda by the comparison;
she had little womanly feeling if she felt flattered. Let us believe,
for her own sake, that she was disgusted. His letter to Ainslie, ten
days later, is something very different, though even yet he gives no
hint of acknowledging Jean as his wife. 'Jean I found banished like a
martyr--forlorn, destitute, and friendless--all for the good old cause.
I have reconciled her to her fate; I have reconciled her to her mother;
I have taken her a room; I have taken her to my arms; I have given her a
guinea, and I have embraced her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable
and full of glory.'
This is flippant in tone, but something more manly in sentiment; Burns
was coming to his senses. On 13th June, twin girls were born to Jean,
but they only lived a few days. On the same day their father wrote from
Ellisland to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, in which we see the real Burns, true
to the best feelings of his nature, and true to his sorely-tried and
long-suffering wife. 'This is the second day, my honoured friend, that I
have been on my farm. A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence, far from
every object I love, or by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older
than yesterday, except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on; while
uncouth cares and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and
bashful inexperience.... Your surmise, madam, is just; I am, indeed, a
husband.... 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 happiness or
misery.'
It was not till August that the marriage was ratified by the Church,
when Robert Burns and Jean Armour were rebuked for their acknowledged
irregularity, and admonished 'to adhere faithfully to one another, as
man and wife, all the days of their life.'
This was the only fit and proper ending of Burns's acquaintance with
Jean Armour. As an honourable man, he could not have done otherwise than
he did. To have deserted her now, and married another, even admitting he
was legally free to do so, which is doubtful, would have been the act of
an abandoned wretch, and certainly have wrought ruin in the moral and
spiritual life of the poet. In taking Jean as his wedded wife, he acted
not only honourably, but wisely; and wisdom and prudence were not always
distinguishing qualities of Robert Burns.
Some months had to elapse, however, before the wife could join her
husband at Ellisland. The first thing he had to do when he entered on
his lease was to rebuild the dwelling-house, he himself lodging in the
meanwhile in the smoky spence which he mentions in his letter to Mrs.
Dunlop. In the progress of the building he not only took a lively
interest, but actually worked with his own hands as a labourer, and
gloried in his strength: 'he beat all for a dour lift.' But it was some
time before he could settle down to the necessarily monotonous work of
farming. 'My late scenes of idleness and dissipation,' he confessed to
Dunbar, 'have enervated my mind to a considerable degree.' He was
restless and rebellious at times, and we are not surprised to find the
sudden settling down from gaiety and travel to the home-life of a farmer
marked by bursts of impatience, irritation, and discontent. The only
steadying influence was the thought of his wife and children, and the
responsibility of a husband and a father. He grew despondent
occasionally, and would gladly have been at rest, but a wife and
children bound him to struggle with the stream. His melancholy blinded
him even to the good qualities of his neighbours. The only things he saw
in perfection were stupidity and canting. 'Prose they only know in
graces, prayers, etc., and the value of these they estimate, as they do
their plaiding webs, by the ell. As for the Muses, they have as much an
idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet.' He was, in fact, ungracious towards
his neighbours, not that they were boorish or uninformed folk, but
simply because, though living at Ellisland in body, his mind was in
Ayrshire with his darling Jean, and he was looking to the future when he
should have a home and a wife of his own. His eyes would ever wander to
the west, and he sang, to cheer him in his loneliness, a song of love to
his Bonnie Jean:
'Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,
I dearly lo'e the west;
For there the bonnie lassie lives,
The lassie I lo'e best.'
It was not till the beginning of December that he was in a position to
bring his wife and children to Ellisland; and this event brought him
into kindlier relations with his fellow-farmers. His neighbours gathered
to bid his wife welcome; and drank to the roof-tree of the house of
Burns. The poet, now that he had made his home amongst them, was
regarded as one of themselves; while Burns, on his part, having at last
got his wife and children beside him, was in a healthier frame of mind
and more charitably disposed towards those who had come to give them a
welcome. That he was now as one settled in life with something worthy to
live for, we have ample proof in his letter written to Mrs. Dunlop on
the first day of the New Year. It is discursive, yet philosophical and
reflective, and its whole tone is that of a man who looks on the world
round about him with a kindly charity, and looks to the future with
faith and trust. Life passed very sweetly and peacefully with the poet
and his family for a time here. The farm, it would appear, was none of
the best,--Mr. Cunningham told him he had made a poet's not a farmer's
choice,--but Burns was hopeful and worked hard. Yet the labour of the
farm was not to be his life-work. Even while waiting impatiently the
coming of his wife, he had been contributing to Johnson's Museum, and he
fondly imagined that he was going to be farmer, poet, and exciseman all
in one. Some have regretted his appointment to the Excise at this time,
and attributed to his frequent absences from home his failure as a
farmer. They may be right. But what was the poet to do? He knew by
bitter experience how precarious the business of farming was, and
thought that a certain salary, even though small, would always stand
between his family and absolute want. 'I know not,' he wrote to Ainslie,
'how the word exciseman, or, still more opprobrious, gauger, will sound
in your ears. I too have seen the day when my auditory nerves would have
felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and children have a
wonderful power in blunting these kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a
year for life and a pension for widows and orphans, you will allow, is
no bad settlement for a _poet_.' And to Blacklock he wrote in verse:
'But what d'ye think, my trusty fier,
I'm turned a gauger--Peace be here!
Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear,
Ye'll now disdain me!
And then my fifty pounds a year
Will little gain me.
I hae a wife and twa wee laddies,
They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies;
Ye ken yoursel's my heart right proud is--
I needna vaunt,
But I'll sned besoms--thraw saugh woodies,
Before they want.
But to conclude my silly rhyme
(I'm scant o' verse, and scant o' time),
To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.'
This was nobly said; and the poet spoke from the heart.
Not content with being gauger, farmer, and poet, Burns took a lively
interest in everything affecting the welfare of the parish and the
well-being of its inhabitants. For this was no poet of the study,
holding himself aloof from the affairs of the world, and fearing the
contamination of his kind. Burns was alive all-round, and always acted
his part in the world as a husband and father; as a citizen and a man.
He made himself the poet of humanity, because he himself was so
intensely human, and joyed and sorrowed with his fellows. At this time
he established a library in Dunscore, and himself undertook the whole
management,--drawing out rules, purchasing books, acting for a time as
secretary, treasurer, and committee all in one. Among the volumes he
ordered were several of his old favourites, _The Spectator_, _The Man of
Feeling_, and _The Lounger_; and we know that there was on the shelves
even a folio Hebrew Concordance.
A favourite walk of the poet's while he stayed here was along Nithside,
where he often wandered to take a 'gloamin' shot at the Muses.' Here,
after a fall of rain, Cunningham records, the poet loved to walk,
listening to the roar of the river, or watching it bursting impetuously
from the groves of Friar's Carse. 'Thither he walked in his sterner
moods, when the world and its ways touched his spirit; and the elder
peasants of the vale still show the point at which he used to pause and
look on the red and agitated stream.'
In spite of his multifarious duties, he was now more than ever
determined to make his name as a poet. To Dr. Moore he wrote (4th
January 1789): 'The character and employment of a poet were formerly my
pleasure, but now my pride.... Poesy I am determined to prosecute with
all my vigour. Nature has given very few, if any, of the profession the
talents of shining in every species of composition. I shall try (for
until trial it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me to
shine in any one.'
It was inevitable that one whose district as an exciseman reached far
and wide could not regularly attend to ploughing, sowing, and reaping,
and the farm was very often left to the care of servants. Dr. Currie
appears to count it as a reproach that his farm no longer occupied the
principal part of his care or his thoughts. Yet it could not have been
otherwise. Burns after having undertaken a duty would attend to it
religiously, and we know that he pursued his work throughout his ten
parishes diligently, faithfully, and with unvarying punctuality. Others
have bemoaned that those frequent Excise excursions led the poet into
temptation, that he was being continually assailed by the sin that so
easily beset him. Let it be admitted frankly that the temptations to
social excess were great; is it not all the more creditable to Burns
that he did not sink under those temptations and become the besotted
wreck conventional biography has attempted to make him? If those who
raise this plaint mean to insinuate that Burns became a confirmed toper,
then they are assuredly wrong; if they be only drawing attention to the
fact that drinking was too common in Scotland at that time, then they
are attacking not the poet but the social customs of his day. It would
be easy if we were to accept 'the general impression of the place,' and
go by the tale of gossip, to show that Burns was demoralised by his
duties as a gauger, and sank into a state of maudlin intemperance. But
ascertained fact and the testimony of unimpeachable authority are at
variance with the voice of gossip. 'So much the worse for fact,'
biography would seem to have said, and gaily sped on the work of
defamation. We only require to forget Allan Cunningham's _Personal
Sketch of the Poet_, the letters from Mr. Findlater and Mr. Gray, and to
close our eyes to the excellence of the poetry of this period, in order
to see Burns on the downgrade, and to preach grand moral lessons from
the text of a wasted life.
But, after all, 'facts are chiels that winna ding,' and we must take
them into account, however they may baulk us of grand opportunities of
plashing in watery sentiment. Speaking of the poet's biographers, Mr.
Findlater remarks that they have tried to outdo one another in heaping
obloquy on his name; they have made his convivial habits, habitual
drunkenness; his wit and humour, impiety; his social talents, neglect of
duty; and have accused him of every vice. Then he gives his testimony:
'My connection with Robert Burns commenced immediately after his
admission into the Excise, and continued to the hour of his death. In
all that time the superintendence of his behaviour as an officer of the
revenue was a branch of my especial province; and it may be supposed I
would not be an inattentive observer of the general conduct of a man and
a poet so celebrated by his countrymen. In the former capacity, so far
from its being impossible for him to discharge the duties of his office
with that regularity which is almost indispensable, as is palpably
assumed by one of his biographers, and insinuated, not very obscurely
even, by Dr. Currie, he was exemplary in his attention as an Excise
officer, and was even jealous of the least imputation on his vigilance.'
But a glance at the poems and songs of this period would be a sufficient
vindication of the poet's good name. There are considerably over a
hundred songs and poems written during his stay at Ellisland, many of
them of his finest. The third volume of Johnson's Museum, published in
February 1790, contained no fewer than forty songs by Burns. Among the
Ellisland songs were such as, _Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon_,
_Auld Lang Syne_, _Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_, _To Mary in Heaven_,
_Of a' the Airts the Wind can blaw_, _My Love she's but a Lassie yet_,
_Tam Glen_, _John Anderson my Jo_, songs that have become the property
of the world. Of the last-named song, Angellier remarks that the
imagination of the poet must have indeed explored every situation of
love to have led him to that which he in his own experience could not
have known. Even the song _Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_, the first of
bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane mind and healthy
appetite. It is not of the diseased imagination of drunken genius. But
the greatest poem of this period, and one of Burns's biggest
achievements, is _Tam o' Shanter_. This poem was written in answer to a
request of Captain Grose that the poet would provide a witch story to be
printed along with a drawing of Alloway Kirk, and was first published in
Grose's _Antiquities of Scotland_. We have been treated by several
biographers to a private view of the poet, with wild gesticulations,
agonising in the composition of this poem; but where his wife did not
venture to intrude, we surely need not seek to desecrate. 'I stept aside
with the bairns among the broom,' says Bonnie Jean; not, we should
imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers. He has been again
burlesqued for us rending himself in rhyme, and stretched on straw
groaning elegiacs to Mary in heaven. All this is mere sensationalism
provided for illiterate readers. We have the poem, and its excellence
sufficeth.
It is worthy of note that in _Tam o' Shanter_, as well as in _To Mary in
Heaven_, the poet goes back to his earlier years in Ayrshire. They are
posthumous products of the inspiration which gave us the Kilmarnock
Edition. I am not inclined to agree with Carlyle in his estimate of _Tam
o' Shanter_. It is not the composition of a man of great talent, but of
a man of transcendent poetical genius. The story itself is a conception
of genius, and in the narration the genius is unquestionable. It is a
panorama of pictures so vivid and powerful that the characters and
scenes are fixed indelibly on the mind, and abide with us a cherished
literary possession. After reading the poem, the words are recalled
without conscious effort of memory, but as the only possible embodiment
of the mental impressions retained. Short as the poem is, there is in it
character, humour, pathos, satire, indignation, tenderness, fun, frolic,
diablerie, almost every human feeling. I have heard Burns in the writing
of this poem likened to a composer at an organ improvising a piece of
music in which, before he has done, he has used every stop and touched
every note on the keyboard. Even the weakest lines of the piece, which
mark a dramatic pause in the rapid narration, have a distinctive beauty
and are the most frequently quoted lines of the poem. In artistic
word-painting and graphic phrasing Burns is here at his best. His
description of the horrible is worthy of Shakspeare; and it is
questionable if even the imagination of that master ever conceived
anything more awful than the scene and circumstance of the infernal
orgies of those witches and warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is!
In the line, 'The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,' all the
gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich. Yet the horrible
details are controlled and unified in the powerful imagination of the
poet. We believe Dr. Blacklock was right in thinking that this poem,
though Burns had never written another syllable, would have made him a
high reputation. Certainly it was not the work of a man daily dazing his
faculties with drink; no more was that exquisite lyric _To Mary in
Heaven_. Another poem of this period deserving special mention is _The
Whistle_, not merely because of its dramatic force and lyrical beauty,
but because it gives a true picture of the drinking customs of the time.
And again I dare assert that this is not the work of a mind enfeebled or
debased by drink. It is a bit of simple, direct, sincere narration,
humanly healthy in tone; the ideas are clear and consecutive, and the
language fitting. It is not so that drunken genius expresses itself. The
language of a poetical mind enfeebled by alcohol or opium is frequently
mystic and musical; it never deals with the realities and
responsibilities of life, but in a witchery of words winds and meanders
through the realms of reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous;
it is rarely narrative or simple; never direct nor forcible.
In the _Kirk's Alarm_, wherein he again reverted to his Mossgiel period,
he displayed all his former force of satire, as well as his sympathy
with those who advocated rational views in religion. Dr. Macgill had
written a book which the Kirk declared to be heretical, and Burns, at
the request of some friends, fought for the doctor in his usual way,
though with little hope of doing him any good. 'Ajax's shield consisted,
I think, of seven bull-hides and a plate of brass, which altogether set
Hector's utmost force at defiance. Alas! I am not a Hector, and the
worthy doctor's foes are as securely armed as Ajax was. Ignorance,
superstition, bigotry, stupidity, malevolence, self-conceit, envy--all
strongly bound in a massy frame of brazen impudence; to such a shield
humour is the peck of a sparrow and satire the pop-gun of a schoolboy.
Creation-disgracing scelerats such as they, God only can mend, and the
devil only can punish.' The doctor yielded, Cunningham tells us, and was
forgiven, but not the poet; pertinently adding, 'so much more venial is
it in devout men's eyes to be guilty of heresy than of satire.'
Into political as well as theological matters Burns also entered with
all his wonted enthusiasm. Of his election ballads, the best, perhaps,
are _The Five Carlins_ and the _Epistle to Mr. Graham of Fintry_. But
these ballads are not to be taken as a serious addition to the poet's
works; he did not wish them to be so taken. He was a man as well as a
poet; was interested with his neighbours in political affairs, and in
the day of battle fought with the weapons he could wield with effect.
Nor are his ballads always to be taken as representing his political
principles; these he expressed in song that did not owe its inspiration
to the excitement of elections. Burns was not a party man; he had in
politics, as in religion, some broad general principles, but he had 'the
warmest veneration for individuals of both parties.' The most important
verse in his _Epistle to Graham of Fintry_ is the last:
'For your poor friend, the Bard, afar
He hears and only hears the war,
A cool spectator purely:
So, when the storm the forest rends,
The robin in the hedge descends,
And sober chirps securely.'
Burns's life was, therefore, quite full at Ellisland, too full indeed;
for, towards the end of 1791, we find him disposing of the farm, and
looking to the Excise alone for a livelihood. In the farm he had sunk
the greater part of the profits of his Edinburgh Edition; and now it was
painfully evident that the money was lost. He had worked hard enough,
but he was frequently absent, and a farm thrives only under the eye of a
master. On Excise business he was accustomed to ride at least two
hundred miles every week, and so could have little time to give to his
fields. Besides this, the soil of Ellisland had been utterly exhausted
before he entered on his lease, and consequently made a miserable return
for the labour expended on it. The friendly relations that had existed
between him and his landlord were broken off before now; and towards the
close of his stay at Ellisland Burns spoke rather bitterly of Mr.
Miller's selfish kindness. Miller was, in fact, too much of a lord and
master, exacting submission as well as rent from his tenants; while
Burns was of too haughty a spirit to beck and bow to any man. 'The life
of a farmer is,' he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, 'as a farmer paying a dear,
unconscionable rent, a cursed life.... Devil take the life of reaping
the fruits that others must eat!'
The poet, too, had been overworking himself, and was again subject to
his attacks of hypochondria. 'I feel that horrid hypochondria pervading
every atom of both body and soul. This farm has undone my enjoyment of
myself. It is a ruinous affair on all hands.' In the midst of his
troubles and vexations with his farm, he began to look more hopefully to
the Excise, and to see in the future a life of literary ease, when he
could devote himself wholly to the Muses. He had already got ranked on
the list as supervisor, an appointment that he reckoned might be worth
one hundred or two hundred pounds a year; and this determined him to
quit the farm entirely, and to try to make a living by one profession.
As farmer, exciseman, and poet he had tried too much, and even a man of
his great capacity for work was bound to have succumbed under the
strain. Even had the farm not proved the ruinous bargain it did, we
imagine that he must have been compelled sooner or later to relinquish
one of the two, either his farm or his Excise commission. Circumstances
decided for him, and in December 1791 he sold by auction his stock and
implements, and removed to Dumfries, 'leaving nothing at Ellisland but a
putting-stone, with which he loved to exercise his strength; a memory of
his musings, which can never die; and three hundred pounds of his money,
sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all augured
happiness.'