PRIDE AND PASSION
ROBERT BURNS 1759-1796
PRIDE AND PASSION
_Robert Burns_
1759-1796
BY
DELANCEY FERGUSON
‘_My great constituent elements are Pride and Passion._’
BURNS TO AGNES M’LEHOSE
DECEMBER 28, 1787
NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1939
Copyright, 1939, by Oxford University Press, New York, Inc.
First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE
All witnesses agree that Robert Burns was a vivid and dynamic
personality. All readers of his poetry concur. Yet somehow the
personality which blazes in the poems and glows in the letters only
smoulders in the biographies. Why is it so hard to write a dull
life of, say, Byron, and so easy to write a dull one of Burns? For
one thing, there are too many biographies, all following the same
stereotyped outline of dividing the poet’s life according to the places
he lived in instead of according to the things he did and thought. Then
really graphic memorabilia are scarce, especially for the formative
years in Ayrshire. People keep saying that Burns was a brilliant
talker, but they seldom report his talk. Finally, too many biographers
have worked in the wrong mood, intent on moralizing or deprecating
rather than interpreting.
This book is not a biography, if that word connotes a narrative written
in straight time-sequence. It is, instead, my answer to the question,
subordinated or ignored by most chronological biographers, What sort
of a man was Robert Burns? I have therefore discarded time-sequence
in favour of the relationships of everyday life in which Burns
most clearly revealed his personality. The plan has at least the
advantage of passing quickly over his almost undocumented youth, and
concentrating attention upon his fully recorded manhood. The formal
biography, whether it be Mrs. Carswell’s romantic approach or Professor
Snyder’s scholarly one, suffers from the necessity of devoting more
space to the scantily reported twenty-seven years in Ayrshire than
to the five richly documented years in Dumfries. I have assumed that
Burns’s character can best be determined from the completest records.
Perhaps to himself John Syme and Maria Riddell were not so important
as Robert Muir and Margaret Chalmers, but the later friendships can be
studied at full length; the earlier ones cannot. Hence I have given
most space to the relationships in which guess-work can be kept to a
minimum.
So, too, I have deliberately limited myself to the best authenticated
sources--Burns’s own letters and poems, and the letters and other
records of his immediate contemporaries. Unsupported oral tradition
I have avoided as basic material. Though I use such anecdotes now
and again as secondary illustrations, it is always with a warning as
to their nature. I have likewise tried to make clear the distinction
between facts and the inferences I have drawn from them.
In one respect at least my preparation for writing about Burns is
unique. Most editors and biographers have either been bred in the
rosy mists of the Burns legend or have worked their way back to the
original records through a mass of secondary printed matter. Up to a
dozen years ago my knowledge of Burns and his times included little
beyond such reading of major works and standard criticism as one
does in preparation for the doctorate. In 1925 I undertook to edit
a reprint of Burns’s chief poems. Discovering in the course of that
job how unsatisfactory were all editions of his correspondence, I
thereupon plunged into the work of tracing and collating the original
holographs. Not until after thorough immersion in these primary sources
did I extend my studies to the letters and other records of Burns’s
contemporaries and to the Burns tradition embalmed in the biographies
and standard editions. When I started I had therefore everything to
learn, but nothing to unlearn, and my basic impression of the poet and
his work was founded on intimate acquaintance with his own words, and
not on what other people had said about him.
The large number of new documents which have turned up in recent years
replaces conjecture with certainty in many once disputed episodes in
Burns’s career. We need no longer depend on libellous Saunders Tait for
details of William Burnes’s troubles at Lochlie; the chronology of the
poet’s Edinburgh peccadillos is fairly clear; we know why Mrs. Dunlop
broke off her correspondence. The verification and completion of the
texts of more than three-fourths of Burns’s own letters is only a part
of the fresh material. Collateral documents ranging from Elizabeth
Paton’s discharge of her claim against Burns to the almost complete
correspondence of two of his most intimate friends are now available,
and I have used them freely. I have also drawn upon other sources
not fully utilized in the past. Most biographers, for instance, have
contemned the so-called ‘Train MS.’ in Edinburgh University library.
This collection of notes on Lockhart’s _Life of Burns_ consists mainly
of anecdotes deriving ultimately from the poet’s friend, John Richmond.
It has been repudiated _in toto_ for no better reason, seemingly, than
that Richmond told a story about one Mary Campbell which does not
tally with the romantic account of Highland Mary, and was mistaken
in the identity of a lady who once called at Burns’s lodgings in
Baxter’s Close. Against these two doubtful items I set the fact that
the author of the notes so accurately described unpublished letters and
verses which he had seen that every one of them since published can be
instantly identified. I base no major conclusions on this MS., but I
can see no justification for ignoring it.
I need not enumerate the volumes of biography, history, and memoirs
which have contributed background materials. They are listed in all the
standard bibliographies. The one great addition to the older lists is
the _Journals_ of James Boswell, which have furnished graphic details
of Scottish life. I hasten to add, however, that Chapter I is not
intended as a complete survey of eighteenth-century Scotland. Even had
completeness been possible in the space at my disposal, it would have
been useless to attempt to repeat what Professor H. W. Thompson has
so superbly done in _A Scottish Man of Feeling_. Hence I have limited
myself to those aspects of national life which bore directly upon
Burns, as I have also done in considering the influence of contemporary
literature. The eighteenth century was not all ‘elegance’, but it was
the elegant authors, and not Swift, Fielding, and Johnson, who appealed
to Burns.
Lest British readers charitably assume that I sin through ignorance,
I ought perhaps also to add that in writing of Burns’s world I have
not hesitated to equate some of its social and political aspects with
their twentieth-century American analogues. To describe a dead world in
dead terms seems a poor way of revivifying it. My omission of footnotes
is likewise deliberate. In a score of articles in various journals
during the past decade I have presented, and fully documented, the
evidence on many controversial points. The articles evoked an almost
passionate apathy; nevertheless they, and their footnotes, are there
if anyone cares to look them up. Furthermore, nearly all the source
documents I have used are now in print, despite the efforts of Burns’s
self-appointed literary executors to suppress certain of them. On two
points I recant some of my earlier statements: I know now that the
circumstances of Burns’s quarrel with the Riddells are not so clear as
I once thought them, and Mr. Stanley Cursiter of the Scottish National
Gallery has given me reason to doubt my identification of the miniature
portrait belonging to Mr. Oliver R. Barrett.
Transcripts of most of the unpublished documents I have used are
included in Mr. Robert T. Fitzhugh’s Cornell University dissertation,
‘Robert Burns as Seen by his Contemporaries’ (1935). I am deeply
indebted to Mr. Fitzhugh for the use of this material and of other
documents he has discovered more recently, chief among them the
letter in which Robert Ainslie described to Agnes M’Lehose his visit
to Ellisland in October, 1790. In addition to the Train MS., above
mentioned, Mr. Fitzhugh’s thesis includes numerous letters by Burns’s
contemporaries, of which the most important are the forty-one which
passed between John Syme and Alexander Cunningham from 1789 to 1797. On
publication in the _Burns Chronicle_ these letters were considerably
expurgated, the deletions including details of the Caledonian Hunt’s
revelry in Dumfries and the most graphic description which has yet come
to light in connection with Burns of a wet evening over the punchbowl.
Many other people have helped me in the work. My wife typed most of
it in its original form, clarified doubtful points by debating them,
and did her best to restrain the wilder excesses of Ph.D. diction.
My colleague, Winfield H. Rogers, read the manuscript, and made many
useful comments. A famous British firm gave me free permission to use
one of Burns’s bawdier letters, but after I published it they were
taken to task by one of the literary executors above mentioned. Since
they found it easier to repudiate a foreigner than to face the wrath
of a compatriot, I shall not embarrass them by repeating my thanks
here. I am indebted to Col. Sir John Murray, D.S.O., for use of the
original MS. of Burns’s journal of his Border tour. Mr. Davidson Cook,
Mr. George W. Shirley, and Mr. John M’Vie have all shared their Burns
discoveries with me, and Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, Mr. Gabriel Wells, and
the late Mr. Charles Sessler renewed my obligations to them by allowing
me to collate MSS. which came into their hands after my edition of the
_Letters_ was published. And finally, I owe a still deeper renewal of
gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, to whose
grant-in-aid this present volume owes its appearance.
DE L. F.
_Western Reserve University
20 August 1938_
CHRONOLOGY OF BURNS’S LIFE
I. AYRSHIRE
1759. _Jan. 25._ Robert Burns born at Alloway; eldest son of William
Burnes (1721-1784) and his wife Agnes Broun (1732-1820). The
other children were Gilbert (1760-1827), Agnes (1762-1834),
Anabella (1764-1832), William (1767-1790), John (1769-1785),
and Isabella (1771-1858).
1765. Robert and Gilbert sent to school to John Murdoch.
1766. William Burnes rents Mt. Oliphant farm.
1768. Murdoch gives up Alloway school. The _Titus Andronicus_
incident.
1772. Robert and Gilbert attend Dalrymple parish school, week about,
during summer quarter.
1773. Robert studies grammar and French with Murdoch for three weeks;
writes his first song, ‘Handsome Nell’, for Nellie Kilpatrick.
1774. Hard times begin at Mt. Oliphant.
1775. Burns attends Hugh Rodger’s school at Kirkoswald.
1777. At Whitsun William Burnes moves from Mt. Oliphant to Lochlie.
1779. Burns joins a dancing class ‘in absolute defiance’ of his
father’s commands.
1780. The Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club organized.
1781. Burns courts Alison Begbie. His father’s dispute with David
M’Lure, his landlord, begins. Burns joins the Freemasons, and
about midsummer goes to Irvine as a flax-dresser.
1782. _Jan. 1._ The Irvine shop burnt out; soon after, Burns returns
to Lochlie.
_Sept. 24._ William Burnes’s dispute referred to arbiters.
1783. _Jan._ Burns wins a £3 prize for flax-seed.
_April._ Burns begins his Commonplace Book.
_May 17._ M’Lure gets a writ of sequestration against William
Burnes.
_Aug. 18._ The ‘Oversman’ reports in Burnes’s favor.
_Aug. 25._ Burnes makes first appeal to Court of Session.
Autumn. Robert and Gilbert secretly arrange to rent Mossgiel.
1784. _Jan. 27._ The Court of Session upholds William Burnes.
_Feb. 13._ Death of William Burnes. The family moves to
Mossgiel.
1785. _May 22._ Birth of Elizabeth, the poet’s daughter by Elizabeth
Paton.
_Nov. 1._ Burial of John Burns, the poet’s youngest brother.
During this year Burns began to write his satires, composed
‘The Jolly Beggars’, and in Oct. finished his first Commonplace
Book. He also met Jean Armour.
1786. _Jan._ (?). Burns plans migration to Jamaica.
_April 3._ ‘Proposals’ for the Kilmarnock _Poems_ sent to press.
_c. April 23._ James Armour repudiates Burns as a son-in-law.
_May 12._ Supposed date of composing ‘The Court of Equity’.
_May 14._ Supposed date of farewell to Highland Mary.
_July 9._ Burns’s first penitential appearance in church.
_July 22._ Burns transfers his share in Mossgiel to Gilbert.
_July 30._ Burns in hiding from James Armour’s writ.
_July 31._ The Kilmarnock _Poems_ published.
_c. Sept. 1._ First postponement of Jamaica voyage.
_Sept. 3._ Jean Armour bears twins, who are christened Robert
and Jean.
_c. Sept. 27._ Second postponement of Jamaica voyage.
_Oct. 23._ Burns dines at Catrine House.
End of _Oct._ Abandonment of Jamaica plans.
_Nov. 27._ Burns sets out for Edinburgh.
_Dec. 1._ Elizabeth Paton accepts Burns’s settlement of her
claim.
II. EDINBURGH
1786. _Nov. 29._ Burns arrives in Edinburgh.
_Dec. 9._ Henry Mackenzie praises the Kilmarnock _Poems in The
Lounger_.
_Dec. 14._ William Creech issues subscription bills for the
Edinburgh edition of the _Poems_.
1787. _Jan. 13._ The Grand Lodge of Scotland toasts Burns as
‘Caledonia’s Bard’.
_April 21._ Edinburgh _Poems_ published.
_April 23._ Burns sells his copyright for 100 guineas.
_May 5-June 1._ Burns tours the Border.
End of _May_. VOL. I of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.
_June 2._ Burns receives Meg Cameron’s appeal.
_June 8._ Burns’s ‘_éclatant_ return to Mauchline’.
End of _June_. Burns tours West Highlands as far as Inverary.
_July 29._ Jean Armour ‘in for it again’.
_Aug. 2._ Burns completes his autobiographical letter to Dr.
John Moore.
_Aug. 8._ Burns returns to Edinburgh.
_Aug. 15._ Burns freed of Meg Cameron’s writ.
_Aug. 25-Sept. 16._ Highland tour with William Nicol.
_Oct. 4-20._ Tour in Stirlingshire.
_Oct._ Death of poet’s daughter, Jean.
_Nov._ Burns begins active work for the _Museum_.
_Dec. 4._ Burns meets Agnes M’Lehose.
_Dec. 7._ Burns dislocates his knee.
_Dec. 8._ The Clarinda correspondence begins.
1788. _Jan. 4._ Burns’s first visit to Clarinda.
_Feb. 13-14._ Peak of the Clarinda correspondence: four letters
in two days.
_Feb. 18._ Burns leaves Edinburgh.
_Feb. 23._ Burns returns to Mauchline; is ‘disgusted’ by Jean.
_Feb. 27 (?)-Mar. 2._ Burns visits Ellisland with John Tennant.
_Mar. 3._ Jean bears twin girls, of whom one dies on Mar. 10 and
the other on Mar. 22.
_c._ _Mar. 13._ Burns returns to Edinburgh.
_Mar. 18._ Burns signs lease of Ellisland.
_Mar. 24._ Burns leaves Edinburgh.
_Mar._ VOL. II of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.
Late _April_. Burns acknowledges Jean Armour as his wife.
_April-May._ Burns receives Excise instructions at Mauchline.
III. DUMFRIESSHIRE
1788. _June 11._ Burns settles at Ellisland.
_July 14._ Burns’s Excise commission issued.
_Nov. 5._ Centenary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’.
_Nov._ Jenny Clow bears Burns a son.
_Dec._ Jean joins Burns in borrowed quarters at the Isle.
1789. _Feb. 16._ Burns goes to Edinburgh to close accounts with Creech
and to settle Jenny Clow’s suit.
_Feb. 28._ Burns returns to Ellisland.
Summer. Burns meets Francis Grose.
_Aug. 18._ Francis Wallace Burns born.
_Sept. 1._ Burns begins duty as Excise officer.
_Nov._ Burns ill with ‘malignant squinancy and low fever’.
1790. _Jan. 27._ Burns’s name placed on list of those eligible for
promotion as Examiners and Supervisors.
_Feb._ VOL. III of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.
_July._ Burns transferred to Dumfries 3d Division.
_July 24._ Death of William Burns in London.
_Dec. 1._ MS. of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ sent to Grose.
1791. _Mar. 31._ Anne Park bears Burns a daughter, Elizabeth.
_April 9._ William Nicol Burns born.
_April._ ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ published in Grose’s _Antiquities of
Scotland_ and in the March _Edinburgh Magazine_.
_June 19-22._ Burns in Ayrshire to attend Gilbert’s wedding.
_Aug. 25._ Auction of crops at Ellisland.
_Sept. 10._ Formal renunciation of Ellisland lease signed.
_Nov. 11._ Burns moves into Dumfries.
_Nov. 29-Dec. 11._ Burns in Edinburgh. Farewell again to
Agnes M’Lehose.
1792. _Feb._ Burns promoted to Dumfries Port Division.
_Feb. 29._ Capture of schooner _Rosamond_.
_April 10._ Burns made honorary member of Royal Company of
Archers, Edinburgh.
_April 19._ Sale of the _Rosamond’s_ carronades.
_Aug._ VOL. IV of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.
_Sept. 16._ Burns begins work for Thomson’s _Select Collection_.
_Nov. 13._ Burns subscribes for Edinburgh _Gazetteer_.
_Nov. 21._ Birth of Elizabeth Riddell Burns.
Mid-_Dec._ Burns’s last visit to Dunlop House.
_Dec. 31._ Inquiry into Burns’s loyalty.
1793. _Jan. 5._ Burns defends himself to Graham of Fintry.
_Feb. 1._ France declares war against England.
_Feb._ Second Edinburgh edition of _Poems_ published.
_March._ Burns asks, and receives, burgess privileges in the
Dumfries schools.
_May 19._ Burns moves to house in Mill Vennel.
_June._ First number of Thomson’s _Select Collection_ published.
_c._ _July 30-Aug. 2._ First Galloway tour with Syme.
_Aug._ The Edinburgh sedition trials.
_c._ _Aug. 30._ ‘Bannockburn’ sent to Thomson.
_c._ _Dec. 31._ Beginning of the Riddell quarrel.
1794. _Jan. 12._ Final breach with Maria Riddell.
_April 21._ Death of Robert Riddell.
_c._ _May 1._ Burns declines a post on _Morning Chronicle_,
London.
_c._ _June 25-28._ Second Galloway tour with Syme.
_Aug. 12._ Birth of James Glencairn Burns.
_c._ _Dec. 22._ Burns appointed Acting Supervisor at Dumfries.
1795. _Jan. 12._ Burns posts the letter which estranged Mrs. Dunlop.
_Jan. 31._ Burns joins in organizing the Dumfries Volunteers.
_Feb._ Reconciliation with Maria Riddell.
_April._ The Reid miniature painted. Alexander Findlater resumes
his duties as Supervisor at Dumfries.
_Sept._ Death of Elizabeth Riddell Burns.
_Dec.-Jan._ Burns ill with rheumatic fever.
1796. _Mar. 12-14._ Food riots in Dumfries.
_July 3-16._ Burns at the Brow Well.
_July 18._ Burns writes his last letter.
_July 21._ Death of Burns.
_July 25._ Funeral of Burns, and birth of his son Maxwell.
_Dec._ VOL. V of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.
CONTENTS
PREFACE v
CHRONOLOGY OF BURNS’S LIFE xiii
I. SCOTLAND 3
II. EDUCATION 34
III. MEN 79
IV. WOMEN 135
V. LIVELIHOOD 188
VI. SONG 234
VII. THE SCOT 278
PRIDE AND PASSION
ROBERT BURNS 1759-1796
PRIDE AND PASSION
I
SCOTLAND
A Scot in the eighteenth century was a poor relation, subject to the
slights and scorns of more prosperous kinfolk, and reared amid poverty,
theology, and filth. When Robert Burns was born, on January 25, 1759,
his native land was almost at the nadir of its independent existence.
Proud and warlike and desperately poor, Scotland had been still an
essentially feudal nation when King James VI was called from amid the
bickerings of his jealous nobles and intransigent clergy to become
James I of England. The permanent removal of the court to London left
the country more than ever the prey of contention among its nobles and
fanaticism among its ecclesiastics; governed by a parliament without
authority; torn at intervals by rebellion and civil strife; denied
commercial parity with England, and cut off from the old-time free
intercourse with France.
The Act of Union of 1707, by admitting Scotland to commercial
privileges formerly restricted to England, started the country
on the road to material prosperity, but promised to destroy the
last vestiges of national pride. It was ‘the end of an old song’.
Thenceforward the affairs of Scotland were entrusted to a handful of
representatives at Westminster, too small, in those days of patronage
and pocket-boroughs, to have enabled even a Scottish Parnell, had
there been one, to sway the balance of power. Scotland was no longer
Scotland; it was North Britain. And when the House of Hanover succeeded
to the English throne, the last vestige of Scottish influence in the
government seemed to have vanished. Ruled no longer by the Stuarts--her
own kings, even though absentee--but by ‘an insolent, beef-witted race
of foreigners’, Scotland turned more and more to the things of the
flesh. The last flicker of the ancient loyalties in the ’45 shed only
light enough to reveal their death. The Lowlands, though they could
not stomach the double treason of a man like Murray of Broughton,
acquiesced in the brutal destruction of the Highland clans. Most of the
comfortable merchants and landed gentry had viewed the uprising with
an apprehension even livelier than that felt by the German court four
hundred miles away; when the Highlands were crushed they rejoiced in
their own increased security, and showed their loyalty to the reigning
House by christening their daughters Charlotte and Wilhelmina, and
their new streets and squares Hanover and Brunswick and George.
By the middle of the century Scottish affairs had settled into an order
which might alter in degree, but would not alter in kind, for two
generations at least. Politically, the country was little more than
a conquered province. Economically it was beginning to emerge from
age-old poverty, but the new prosperity of the lucky few was widening
the gap between them and the poor and still further depressing the
latter. Religiously it was awakening from the nightmare of Calvinism
which had paralysed free thought and free action for two centuries.
Intellectually its literary life was being overwhelmed by the fashions
and standards of England, and its educated citizens were suffering from
an inferiority complex of national scope.
When Warren Hastings was impeached, Burns was angry because it was done
in the name of the Commons of England and not of Great Britain. Had
he expressed his opinion in public, instead of in a private letter,
it would have roused little sympathy among his more influential
countrymen. Most would have dismissed it as the rant of a fanatic; a
few would have held it downright treason. There was no money in being a
Scottish patriot. As in England, all things political went by favour.
The only difference was that in Scotland they went by favour of one
man--the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Bute, or Henry Dundas, as the case
might be. All power concentrated at last in the hands of the national
boss. He ‘suggested’ the choice of the sixteen Scottish peers who
were to represent their country in the House of Lords; he controlled
the election of the forty-five members of the Commons; his word was
law as to all appointive offices. Fifteen members of the Commons were
chosen by the burgh councils--self-perpetuating groups which in ‘the
taciturn regularity of ancient affairs’ allowed no outsider to intrude
on their privileges and their graft. The other thirty were chosen
by the counties, and in all Scotland there were fewer than three
thousand qualified electors, every man of whom was ticketed as to party
allegiance and family connection. Most of them also had their prices
plainly marked on their tickets. Of course the price need be nothing so
crude as cash. Every job, from a cadetship with the East India Company
to the governorship of a province, was obtainable by influence, and
by influence only; hence there were plenty of ways of swaying a man’s
vote, especially if he had a rising family of hungry younger sons,
without soiling his fingers with gold.
Everyone played the game, and took the rules for granted. Why wait
for merited promotion, if you could get it quicker by pulling wires?
The only man Sir Walter Scott ever deliberately cut was the one who
publicly criticized him for securing his brother’s appointment to a
post which he knew was soon to be abolished--with a pension for the
ousted incumbent. It was a comfortable system for those on the inside.
As for the others, they were expected to do their duty in that state of
life to which it had pleased God to call them.
But it was not merely in political jobs that the influential classes
were doing well for themselves. The Act of Union had admitted Scottish
merchants to the privileges of the colonial trade formerly open only to
the English. Throughout the eighteenth century the south of Scotland
experienced a whole series of industrial and real estate booms.
Though by twentieth-century standards of bankruptcy the booms were
small and local, they had all the familiar characteristics. Glasgow
and its neighbourhood, for instance, when once it had recovered from
the losses of the crazy Darien Expedition--as wild a speculation as
the later Mississippi Bubble in France and the South Sea madness in
England--throve soberly on its steadily increasing commerce with the
West Indies and the American Colonies. The passerby today, between the
Trongate and the Broomielaw, may read in Union Street and George Square
how mercantile Scotland felt towards the loss of its parliament, and
find Jamaica and Virginia Streets underscoring the reason; further
west, St. Vincent Street, Nile Street, Pitt Street, and Wellington
Street show the direction of Glaswegian sympathies in the long struggle
with Napoleon. And since commerce is by definition two-sided the ships
which brought back American cotton and tobacco and sugar took out
Scottish linens and woolens and shoes from steadily growing centres of
manufacture.
On the east coast, Edinburgh was not merely expanding; it was on the
way to transforming itself. Unable by its location to share directly in
the overseas trade, it throve on the legal business which grew out of
that trade, on the increasing demand for education which benefited both
the university and the printers and booksellers, and on the invested
profits of Scotsmen who had made money in the East or West Indies and
who settled in the capital when they retired. Until after the ’45 the
city was still packed along the ridge from Holyrood to the Castle,
its population crowded into the tall tenements which shut out the low
northern sun from the narrow wynds. Its first expansion was to the
south, in a development, near the present site of the University, on
which Burns’s father and uncle found work when they struck out for
themselves in 1750. To the north of the Old Town all was then open
country. At the foot of the Castle Rock, where the railway tracks now
run, the marshy Nor Loch still received whatever of the city’s garbage
did not remain in the streets. Burns was four years old when the
real growth of the modern city began with the building of the North
Bridge to connect the Old Town with the ridge which paralleled it to
northward. Each year thereafter saw new houses or new squares added,
but as late as 1800 the New Town still consisted only of Princes,
George, and Queen Streets from St. Andrew Square to Charlotte Square.
Until after Burns’s death the whole area, despite the Georgian dignity
and charm of its houses, retained many of the features of a new and raw
development. In particular, the valley was half choked by the hideous
Mound formed of the earth excavated in grading the New Town. The laying
out of the Princes Street Gardens and the crowning of the Mound with
the Scottish National Gallery were still far in the future--there was
even talk of a row of buildings on the south side of Princes Street
which would have blinded one of the finest city vistas in the world,
and have made the Gardens forever impossible. By 1786, when Burns
first saw Edinburgh, wealth and fashion had already deserted the Old
Town, and middle-class respectability was beginning to follow, but
the business life of the city still centred in the shops and taverns
which lined the High Street, crammed the narrow Luckenbooths which
congested traffic beside disfigured St. Giles’s, and overflowed into
all the adjacent courts and closes. Professional men transacted their
business in taverns in preference to their crowded living-quarters; all
Edinburgh was accustomed to gather at midday in the neighbourhood of
the Cross to arrange business and social appointments.
Sanitation did not exist. Water for cooking and such exiguous washing
as was done was carried by porters from the public wells to the
various flats in the tall ‘lands’; the day’s filth of the household
was collected in a tub on the landing of the stairs and at bedtime the
barefoot maid-servants emptied it out of the windows--theoretically to
be gathered up by the scavengers; actually, too often, to lie where it
fell until a rain washed it away. Even the hardy nostrils of Londoners
quailed before the marshalled stenches of Edinburgh, and travelling
Scotsmen gauged the smells of foreign cities like Lisbon by their nasal
memories of home. That children should die like flies was inevitable;
the marvel is that any survived. Deficiency diseases were as rife as
filth diseases. Rickets was taken for granted--a simile, humorous in
intent but ghastly in effect in one of Scott’s letters, gives a glimpse
of nurse-maids in Princes Street trying to compel unhappy rachitic
children to walk. Human life has always been Scotland’s cheapest
commodity. That a high degree of social and intellectual culture should
flourish amid this filth is merely another proof of human capacity for
ignoring what it is too indolent to correct.
Outside the cities, as well as in them, Scottish life was beginning
to change. Primitive agriculture in the northern kingdom, like the
sanitation of Edinburgh, seemed almost to be an effort to demonstrate
just how badly a thing could be done. The poorest sorts of oats and
barley, the scrubbiest of cattle, were raised by the worst methods. The
unfenced fields were divided by a system of ridges and ditches which
managed to combine the maximum of soil wastage with the minimum of
drainage. The ‘infield’, as this dyked portion of the farm was called,
was cultivated with ploughs so crude and awkward that they required
four horses and two men to handle them. The ‘outfield’, or pasture, was
never cultivated or manured; overrun with moss and weeds it yielded
even in summer only a scanty and unwholesome pasturage, with little if
any surplus to carry the cattle through the winter. All excess stock
was slaughtered in the fall, and for six months of the year the people
who could afford meat at all had to subsist like seamen on salt beef
and smoked mutton hams. The wretched beasts which were kept through the
winter were fed mainly on straw, and frequently by spring were so weak
and emaciated that they had to be carried to the pasture.
The owners of the cattle lived in a style which an Iroquois would have
thought primitive. Gilbert Burns resented the statement that his famous
brother was born in a hovel. The Alloway cottage, he declared, was
better than the houses then occupied by many substantial farmers. So it
was. It had a chimney, whereas in many a cottage and farmhouse, long
after Burns’s youth--Keats saw plenty of them in Ayrshire in 1818--such
of the smoke as did not enter the eyes and lungs of the tenants escaped
through the door. But even with a chimney the average farmhouse or
labourer’s cottage, with its walls of stone or rammed clay, its earthen
floor and thatched roof, and with the fire seldom built up except for
cooking, had a winter chill and dampness that bred tuberculosis in the
young and rheumatism in the old. As at Alloway, the stable was usually
under the same roof, and its reek mingled with the dampness and the
smell of unwashed humanity. An English proverb in the seventeenth
century asserted that the Scots had neither bellows, warming-pans, nor
houses of office; and that the proverb still held in the eighteenth is
proved alike by experiences of Johnson and Boswell in gentlemen’s homes
in the Highlands and by episodes in the chapbooks of Dugal Graham which
reveal the same use of the fireplace as Shakespeare records of the
inn at Rochester. Outside the door was the midden-dub or glaur-hole,
manure-heap of man and beast alike, often so surrounded with stagnant
water that the ‘rather pretty’ girl whom Keats saw standing at a
cow-house door in the Highlands, ‘fac’d all up to the ankles in
dirt’, would in the Lowlands a generation earlier have been a sight
too commonplace to excite remark. When the seepage from the midden-dub
reached the water-supply the cycle of filth and typhoid was complete.
Dead animals which could not be eaten were usually dumped into the
nearest stream, so that if the water-supply was not contaminated in one
way, it was pretty sure to be in another. But unless the animal were a
horse, it had to be very dead indeed not to be eaten. Sheep that had
died by accident or disease had a special name--‘braxies’--and were the
perquisite of the shepherds; the flesh of diseased cattle was sometimes
the only meat farm servants tasted; in Edinburgh young Henry Mackenzie
once observed two bakers of cheap ‘mutton pies’ suspiciously engaged
by night about the carcass of a horse on the bank at the back of the
Castle.
Within doors all domestic equipment was on the same primitive scale
as the housing. At meal-times the pot containing the thick oatmeal
porridge which was the staple food was placed in the centre of
the table, and each member of the family--servants included--fell
to work with his own spoon. Barley for broth was prepared on the
knocking-stone, counterpart of the Mexican _metate_. Pewter dishes
were a luxury, and crockery ones almost unknown. Wooden trenchers were
frequently used even by the clergy, and were the regular thing in
farmhouses; the milk was kept in wooden vessels so permeated with dirt
and bacteria that it soured in a few hours. The entire family lived
and ate and slept in two rooms, with sometimes a windowless loft above
as additional sleeping-quarters for the servants or some of the older
children. Every cottage had at least one box-bed built into the wall.
When the occupants retired and closed the sliding wooden doors they
enjoyed a practically airless seclusion amid their own effluvia. The
rest of the family slept on rough cots, or even straw pallets on the
floor. The popular saying, ‘The clartier [dirtier] the cosier’, was not
satire; it was just a matter-of-fact summary of rural living conditions.
In dwellings like these, where a large family was often augmented by
several servants, privacy was as impossible as in an army barrack.
Any conversation too intimate to be shouted above the uproar of
the children into the ears of a mixed audience had to be conducted
elsewhere than in the house--in the fields, if the weather permitted;
in the stable otherwise. Even so, of course, all the circumstances
leading up to the conversation were known to a large and intensely
interested group. Hence the young people, making a virtue of publicity,
took their cronies into their confidence and employed them to arrange
their trysts. Thus if James Smith beckoned Jean Armour or Betsy Miller
away from her giggling family it was fairly certain that he was making
an appointment for Rob Mossgiel and not for himself; if Burns waited
on Jenny Surgeoner it was in John Richmond’s interests and not in his
own. It was difficult to surprise, and impossible to shock by any of
the normal processes of nature, a people who lived in such conditions.
No one had to explain ‘the facts of life’ to the children of that
world; they witnessed them daily. It would almost seem that a belief in
original virtue, rather than original sin, was requisite to explain why
the moral status of the peasantry was often so much less squalid than
their physical surroundings.
As the century advanced, however, closer intercourse with England
roused ambitious landlords to attempt improvements. Trees were planted
on the hillsides and about the naked houses; the ‘infields’ were
levelled and enclosed. Yet nine-tenths of the fences in Ayrshire were
not built until after 1766, and as late as 1800 two-thirds of Fife was
still fenceless. Rotation of crops, better cultivation, artificial
grasses, more productive types of grain, were all experimented with.
Potatoes and turnips, regarded as garden luxuries in the early part
of the century, began to be grown on a large scale for human food and
stock feed respectively. John Wesley in 1780 noted that vegetables had
become as plentiful in Scotland as in England, though on his first
visit, in 1762, he had found none at all, even on noblemen’s tables.
Carts were introduced for farm work, to take the place of the ‘creels’
or panniers, in which manure had formerly been borne on horseback to
the fields, and of the rough sledges on which the sheaves had been
hauled from harvest field to stackyard. The wide use of carts, however,
had in many districts to await the improvement of the roads; in some
instances, when landlords first offered wheeled vehicles as gifts to
their tenants, they were refused because it seemed impossible to drag
them through the mud.
Some few of the improving landlords were actuated by disinterested zeal
to better living-conditions; their stubborn and superstitious peasants
were helped against their will. Many more landlords were motivated by
simple greed to improve their rent-rolls. By breaking up small holdings
occupied on short-term leases, and throwing several together, they made
more profitable farms which were rented for long terms. The consequent
evictions, however, produced an over-supply of would-be tenants whose
desperate need for land resulted in competitive bidding from those
willing to take a gambling chance on getting from the soil more than it
really had to give. If they succeeded, it was too often at the expense
of the health and strength of themselves, their children, and their
servants.
Nevertheless, so far as the improvements in methods increased the
productivity of the farms, the new developments were economically
sound. But the nation’s increasing foreign trade operated to inflate
land values. Merchants who had made money in the Indies wished to
retire, and the prestige of setting up as landed gentry combined with
the lack of sound corporate investments to bid up the value of land
in the more attractive parts of the kingdom to levels where a fair
return on the investment was possible only by rack-renting the tenants.
Burns himself, and his father before him, were victims of this
over-capitalization. They had to pay for marginal lands at rates which
would have been fair rentals for the best. And of course speculation
in land brought with it speculative banking. In Burns’s youth many of
the Ayrshire gentry were crippled or ruined outright by the failure of
the Douglas and Heron Bank, which, organized on a lavish scale, quickly
got into trouble through excessive loans on real estate. The ruined
gentry retired to the Continent, or to lodgings in Edinburgh, and their
estates were taken over by nabobs home from the Indies.
All this drama of political corruption and of social and economic
change was played against the background of the old religious life
of Scotland. Though the intellectual life of the country had never
been squalid like its physical life, it had at the beginning of the
eighteenth century become torpid. From the time of John Knox until
after the Act of Union the real government of Scotland, like that of
colonial Massachusetts, was a theocracy. The King and the powers of the
state were far off from the life of the average peasant or tradesman,
but the Kirk watched all his goings out and comings in. Not only did
it administer matters which in other times and other nations have
been regarded as spiritual concerns, but it also largely took the
place of magistrates and police. Critics of puritanism who have chosen
colonial New England as their dire example have made a mistake. They
should have chosen Scotland. Whatever the theory of church government
in New England may have been, in practice the man at odds with the
establishment suffered few real hardships beyond the loss of his vote
and a moderate amount of discriminatory taxation--provided he had
the discretion to mind his business and keep his mouth shut. But in
seventeenth-century Scotland estrangement from the church might mean
exile from the kingdom, under penalty of practical starvation if the
rebel tried to stick it out at home. Except that it lacked the power
to relax its heretics to the secular arm for mutilation or death, the
Scottish hierarchy was own brother to the Spanish Inquisition.
In every parish the Kirk Session was supposed to maintain a snooping
committee to investigate the conduct of the laity. The reckless
parishioner who desecrated the Sabbath by cooking a hot meal, by
puttering in his garden, or even by taking a walk, was haled before
the Session for discipline, and could be reinstated in the communion
only by confession of his sin and payment of a fine. For more serious
offences the penalties were proportionately heavier, unless one were
wealthy or powerful enough to cow the inquisitors. Burns had painfully
intimate knowledge of the cutty stool, or mourners’ bench, whereon
those guilty of fornication or other deadly sin had thrice to appear
before the congregation while the minister rebuked them at length and
with specific detail. Girls sometimes committed suicide or murdered
their children to escape the public shame, and the effect of the ordeal
on those who submitted was more likely to be hardening than chastening.
Many another youth besides Burns inwardly resolved thenceforth to live
up to the reputation thus fastened upon him.
The Kirk frowned upon, and tried to suppress, such secular amusements
as music and dancing. In spite of the ban, the custom of ‘penny
weddings’, whereby impecunious young couples in the rural districts
sought, by giving what was in effect a subscription ball, to raise
money enough to set them up in housekeeping, still persisted; but even
these gatherings had a slightly furtive quality, and in the stricter
homes all such things were taboo. The moral results of the policy of
repression were almost wholly bad. The older men, in default of other
relaxation, devoted themselves to drink; the younger, to the pleasures
that give its point to Burns’s simile, ‘as busy as an Edinburgh bawd on
a Sunday evening’.
Probably none but a native Scot can understand the finer points of
Scottish theology. Fortunately, however, such understanding is not
needed for a general grasp of church affairs in the eighteenth century.
Primitive Calvinism shares with Marxism the distinction of being the
most completely deterministic philosophy ever widely accepted in the
western world. All men were held to be equally sinful and equally
deserving of eternal damnation. ‘Adam as the federal representative of
the human race had determined its fate once and for all by violating
that unfortunate covenant which he and the Deity had contracted with
regard to the forbidden fruit. A vicarious sacrifice had indeed been
offered; but the power to avail themselves of this expiation was to
be communicated to only a few of the minority to whom it had been
made known; and these were to be saved to show that God was merciful,
as the rest were to be damned to show that He was just.’[1] This was
the creed of which Oliver Wendell Holmes said that any decent person
really holding it ought to go mad out of mere self-respect. And
like every other rigid system it had the effect of stultifying its
sincerest adherents. The most patriotic of historians are compelled
to recognize the general intellectual torpor of Scottish theological
and philosophical writing in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. The thinking of the clergy had been finished for them by
John Calvin and John Knox; all that remained for them to do was to
expound. No first-rate mind can subdue itself to the mere unquestioning
exposition of other men’s views without losing its edge, and few of
the parish clergy in Scotland had started with first-rate minds.
Their preaching was commonly a dreary reiteration of the doctrine of
the Four-Fold State of Man--first, Innocence or Primitive Integrity,
next Nature or Entire Depravation, then Grace or Begun Recovery, and
finally Consummate Happiness or Misery--brightened only by sadistic
imaginings of the details of eternal torment. As if these doctrinal
limitations were not sufficiently deadening, custom required that
one of the minister’s two discourses each Sunday should be preached
from his ‘ordinary’ text--which meant that he was expected to take
the same text week after week and torture it into new applications of
doctrine. If his invention failed under the strain, and he changed his
‘ordinary’ too often, zealous parishioners were likely to complain to
the Presbytery. Add to these handicaps the fact that few ministers had
money enough to buy books, even had they wished for books, and one
begins to realize why Scottish manses two hundred years ago contributed
no such leaders of national thought as were even then emerging from
English rectories.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] W. L. Mathieson: _Scotland and the Union_ (Glasgow, 1905), p. 225.
Nevertheless the tides of changing ideas stirred even the strongholds
of Calvinism. Before the seventeenth century ended Michael Wigglesworth
in Massachusetts had found himself compelled slightly to modify the
doctrine of infant damnation in the direction of human decency; in
Scotland the ‘common sense’ doctrines of the Deists penetrated during
the eighteenth century even among those who abhorred the name of Deism.
From 1729 until his death in 1746 Francis Hutcheson, as professor of
Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, expounded to steadily growing
classes his theory of the ‘moral sense’--an allegedly innate human
capacity for distinguishing right from wrong. This concept of innate
virtue as opposed to the idea of original sin rapidly gained ground
among the laity and the younger clergy of the cities, despite bitter
hostility on the part of the conservatives. Preaching began to stress
conduct rather than the will of a cruel and capricious god as the way
of salvation. A healthier and more prosperous nation was in fact
rebelling against a harsh and depressing philosophy, and the clergy
were following the lead of their congregations. By the third quarter
of the century the liberal faction, the Moderates or New Lights, were
in almost undisputed control in the metropolitan districts, though
the fundamentalists, or Old Lights, still flourished in the smaller
towns and in the rural parishes. The more rigorous extremes of kirk
discipline began to relax. Though in 1757 John Home was compelled to
resign his pulpit to escape the consequence of having written _The
Tragedy of Douglas_--to witness the early performances of which a
few of his more daring clerical brethren disguised themselves in the
garments of the laity--the ban on the theatre gradually sank into
desuetude. Even while the Edinburgh playhouse was still unlicensed,
and dramas had to be advertised as concerts of music between the parts
of which the play of the evening would be presented gratis, it became
possible for ministers to attend the performances openly.