January 25, 1759, Robert Burns was born. The Scottish winter was doing
its worst--‘a blast o’ Janwar’ win’ blew handsel in on Robin’. In other
words, a few days after the poet’s birth a wild Atlantic gale tore out
part of the clay gable of the cottage where it had settled unevenly
round the stone jambs of the chimney. Mother and baby had to be carried
through the storm to a neighbour’s house, where they sheltered until
the damage could be repaired. To Burns in later years the incident
seemed an augury of his own stormy life. The world had begun to
educate him to its harshness almost before he knew that he was in it.
Fortunately he had a father who was determined that his children should
also have an education in the more conventional sense.
Though Scotland theoretically provided a free school in every parish,
the usual gap separated theory and practice. Sometimes there was no
school at all; often the school was an unsanitary hovel presided over
by a master who was expected to live on a salary of perhaps ten or
fifteen pounds a year, and who therefore was constantly driven to
desperate shifts to provide for himself and his family. John Wilson of
Tarbolton, for instance, the victim of ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’, tried
to eke out his meagre earnings by starting a little grocery shop in his
cottage, and in 1790 was ready to undertake the drudgery of a legal
copyist in Edinburgh in order to better his condition. After the close
of the century, when every parish was ordered by Act of Parliament
to provide its schoolmaster with a house of at least two rooms, some
lairds objected to erecting ‘palaces for dominies’. And even when a
parish had a decent schoolhouse and a competent teacher, bad roads and
lack of conveyance often made it impossible for children from outlying
farms to reach it.
When William Burnes built his cottage at Alloway the fact that there
was no school nearer than Ayr would scarcely have worried him. His own
book-learning was sketchy, his writing cramped and laborious, though
his speech was more precise and ‘better English’ than that of most
of his neighbours. But he was devoutly religious, and cherished the
sound Presbyterian conviction that first-hand acquaintance with the
Scriptures was essential to knowledge in this world and salvation in
the next. By the time his eldest son was six years old the father,
conscious of his own inadequacy as a teacher, arranged with half a
dozen neighbours to hire a master of their own. Their choice fell on
John Murdoch, a solemn and pedantic youth of eighteen, who in mentality
somewhat resembled Ichabod Crane. For wages of about sixpence a day
and his board--which meant a share of the oatmeal and kail and part of
a bed in each crowded cottage in turn--Murdoch undertook to instruct
his charges, not without tears, in the three R’s and also in such
elementary music as would enable them to sing the Psalms of David in
metre at family worship.
In this latter accomplishment he found Robert Burns, who in manhood
was able to remember and distinguish in all their subtle variations
hundreds of folk melodies, an almost hopeless pupil with a harsh and
untuneable voice. At the task of beating into the future poet the
elements of spelling, grammar, and syntax he was more successful.
Instruction in reading was based largely on a volume of extracts
compiled by another Scottish schoolmaster named Arthur Masson--good
enough literature for the most part, but too declamatory to be really
within the grasp of a six- or seven-year-old intelligence. Robert’s
first conscious realization of poetic experience came from Addison’s
hymn, ‘How are Thy servants blest, O Lord’: he also memorized the ‘Fall
of Cardinal Wolsey’ and other set pieces so thoroughly that throughout
his life their phrases came unbidden from his pen. If Murdoch found
difficulty in making the children understand the poetic merits of
Hamlet’s soliloquies or of long passages from Home’s _Tragedy of
Douglas_, he at least convinced some of them that poetry had meaning.
One of his favourite exercises was making them paraphrase poetry
into straight-forward prose--a device which his most famous pupil
subsequently employed in exposing bad grammar in a female admirer’s
verses.
Murdoch was not the man to set a poetic child’s imagination on fire,
and since he applied the usual schoolmasterly standard of judging
the pupils according to their docility, it is hardly surprising that
he found the timid and gentle Gilbert a more promising lad than his
brother. In any case, Murdoch’s service was too brief to have much
permanent influence on Burns’s mind. Before the master had completed
his tenure of about two years and a half at Alloway, William Burnes
had removed to Mount Oliphant farm, separated from the school by two
miles of sodden road which must have made regular attendance difficult,
and sometimes impossible. Yet the master retained a sort of puzzled
affection for the boy whom he was too prosaic to understand, and Burns
reciprocated the feeling with real respect and esteem. Murdoch, in the
schoolroom and in the long evenings in what he called the argillaceous
fabric or mud domicile at Alloway, had at least impressed the lesson
that books had meaning and that words should be used with precision.
That Burns in later life never had any difficulty in saying precisely
what he meant, he probably owed at root to Murdoch’s severe drill; that
his style of saying it was frequently much too formal he likewise owed
to the dominie and to the prose selections of Arthur Masson.
The earliest stages of book education are seldom important in shaping
the maturity of the learner. They only furnish him with a few tools
which he may later apply in his own way to his own ends. But with
Burns the whole pressure of his formal education was all his life in
direct conflict with his instinctive preferences. For John Murdoch,
as for Arthur Masson, Scottish vernacular literature did not exist.
Scottish writers like James Thomson and John Home, who had made
reputations in England by writing in standard English, were admired
to the far side of idolatry, but for Scottish youths, as for English,
Pope was the model for poetry; the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ for prose.
Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden were the only writers earlier than 1700
who were widely read and unreservedly admired, though the beginnings of
romanticism were evoking some lip-service to Spenser. If Chaucer was
read at all, it was in the modernizations and imitations of Dryden,
Pope, and Prior; the Elizabethan and Caroline lyrists were safe sources
for newspaper poets to steal from, as Sterne stole from Burton. By
modern standards, the amount of native literature needed in order to
appear well-read was limited, but its very limitation intensified its
pressure. Poverty kept Burns from the influence, for good or ill, of
the classics; nothing could preserve anyone, who read at all, from the
influence of the neo-classics. Outside the door the rich vernacular
literature of Scotland was still vigorously alive, but no schoolmaster
in Burns’s boyhood would have dreamed of letting it in.
This literature, indeed, was being steadily thrust further out of the
cultivated world. Two years before the poet’s father was born, Lady
Elizabeth Wardlaw had written the ballad fragment of ‘Hardyknute’ with
genuine folk skill; in the next generation such interest as remained
was contaminated with literary sophistication. The gentlefolk of
William Burnes’s generation could no longer write true ballads, but
they could and did write true folk-songs, as witness Jean Elliot’s
‘Flowers of the Forest’, Alison Cockburn’s ‘I’ve seen the smiling
of Fortune beguiling’, and John Skinner’s ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John
o’ Badenyon’. The gentlefolk of Robert Burns’s generation had lost
this power too. Burns was six years old when Percy’s _Reliques_
inaugurated the serious study of popular literature and let loose the
spate of forgery and imitation of which Macpherson’s _Ossian_ was the
most brilliant success. The national will to believe in Macpherson’s
fabrication was proof alike against the scorn of Dr. Johnson and the
learning of antiquaries. To many Scots besides Burns Ossian was the
‘prince of poets’, to be read and admired as a patriotic duty, even if
few of his vague and turgid phrases could be remembered long enough to
quote. And what Macpherson did on the grand scale ballad ‘editors’ like
John Pinkerton were doing on a small one, debasing even their genuine
material with sentimental trash which blinded many readers to the
merits of a really honest and accurate editor like David Herd.
But all this activity, alike of forgery and of honest collecting,
never touched Burns in his formative years. In the boy’s world the
folk literature which David Herd was recording was still alive. It is
a favourite fallacy of the half-educated to identify book-learning
with education. The things which made the mind and the art of Burns
did not come from John Murdoch, but from people whom Murdoch no
doubt patronized in his most schoolmasterful style. Agnes Broun
was illiterate, but she was not ignorant. Like most intelligent
illiterates, she had cultivated her memory, storing it with the pithy
sayings which sum up generations of folk experience, and with the words
and music of scores of old songs and ballads. These simple rhythms,
sung as she went about her work, sank into her son’s mind without his
knowing it. Years afterwards some chance association would recall an
old line or stanza of his mother’s to supply the ‘starting note’ for
a song of his own. And her repertoire was powerfully supplemented by
old Betty Davidson’s, who ‘had the largest collection in the county of
tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches,
warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths,
apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other
trumpery’. To these tales, listened to with delighted shudders, he
ascribed the first awakening of his imagination, even though some
of them scared him so thoroughly that their effect stayed with him
into manhood. No doubt many a gentleman’s son heard similar stories
from nurses and servants, but formal classical education effectually
smothered any idea of putting them to literary use. Sir Walter
Scott was almost the first child of the upper ranks to realize his
folk-heritage, and probably he owed much of his freedom to do so to
the interruption of his scholastic training. Ill-health saved him from
formalism, as poverty saved Burns.
Burns’s acquaintance with popular and traditional literature was not,
however, limited to what he heard at home. The eighteenth century
was the heyday of the chapbook and the broadside--forms of popular
literature resulting from the spread of literacy among the middle and
lower classes, which were finally swept away by the newspaper. In
Burns’s childhood every peddler’s pack contained an assortment ranging
from topical songs and reports of the death and dying words of the
latest criminal to abridgements of old histories and romances. Even the
poorest labourer could afford the penny or two these publications cost,
and they passed from hand to hand until they were worn out. William
Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s modernization of Blind Harry’s _History of
Sir William Wallace_, which so roused Burns’s boyish patriotism, may
have reached the lad in chapbook form; the Life of Hannibal which he
also mentions was almost certainly a chapbook; he was familiar from his
earliest years with such ephemera as ‘The Aberdeen Almanac’ and ‘Six
Excellent New Songs’. But he nowhere mentions another group of writings
which he assuredly read.
Only a few years before Burns was born, Dugal Graham, the hunchbacked
bellman of Glasgow, began publishing a series of Scottish chapbooks.
Their popularity was enormous; total sales are alleged to have run
into the hundreds of thousands. The most pretentious of Graham’s
works was a metrical history of the ’45; the most characteristic were
the humorous prose tales such as ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, ‘The
Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman’, and ‘The Comical Sayings of
Paddy from Cork’. These chaps were made up of traditional anecdotes of
a broadly comic sort, loosely strung together but supplied by Graham
with the local colour of Scottish peasant life. Much of Graham’s
material had a long history; coarse jests which go back at least as
far as Chaucer; folk-tales of unquenchable vitality, such as the one
on which Synge long afterwards based _The Shadow of the Glen_; quaint
figures of speech and wild exaggerations, some of which crossed the
Atlantic to become the progenitors of the American ‘tall story’. The
peasant world as Graham depicted it was tough and crude and unlovely,
but full of a coarse vitality which enlivened even the baldest passages
of Graham’s prose and which at its best expressed itself in pungent
phrases remembered and used by Burns, probably long after he had
forgotten their source. The most indecorous stanza in ‘Holy Willie’s
Prayer’ is based on a phrase from ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, as is
a similar stanza in ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’.
But the peasant life of Scotland, however squalid its physical
circumstances as Dugal Graham portrayed them, had a variety of interest
unknown to the modern dweller in a city slum. When the technique of all
the varied crafts necessary to rural life had to be learned by example
and oral tradition, the whole process of living was an education.
Almost as soon as they were able to walk the children began to take
their part in the work of the farm. At the age of six or thereabouts
the boys would be helping to guide the four-horse team which dragged
the clumsy plough; not long afterwards they began to share in reaping,
threshing, and winnowing, besides doing the innumerable and endless
small chores of the farm. These tasks, with all their accompanying
observations of plants and animals, of weather and seasons, were
stronger influences on Burns than John Murdoch was. No poet has
revealed a closer or more accurate knowledge of nature; no poet, it
may be added, had less of romantic enthusiasm for pure scenery. Burns
knew nature as the peasant and the savage knows it, as something on
which his health and prosperity and his very life depend. Readers who
are surprised that Burns spent much of his youth in sight of the noble
peaks of Arran without ever mentioning them in his verse simply fail to
understand the realism of the peasant’s point of view. It was not the
dalesmen who won a hard living from valley farms or kept their sheep on
the bleak mountainsides who found the poetry in the Lake District. Had
Burns been reared on Loch Lomond or at Aberfoyle it would have made no
difference; he would have been too busy trying to wring a living from
the soil to note the scenery. That had to wait for Sir Walter Scott,
who had nothing to do but admire it. Even when he had won fame and had
consciously accepted his vocation as a national poet Burns paid only
lip-service to scenery as scenery. For him it was merely background
for human figures, preferably female. The spots which really stirred
his emotions were those with associations of history or song--Cawdor
Castle, the field of Bannockburn, Elibanks and Elibraes, the Bush aboon
Traquair. And the fact that so many of the folk-songs of Scotland
celebrate the streams whose valleys were the only fertile spots may
have fostered the love for running water repeatedly expressed in his
poetry, as it certainly roused him to do for the streams of Ayrshire
what his anonymous forerunners had done for the streams of the Border.
Not all the boy’s education, however, was thus casual and informal.
When his removal from Alloway to Mount Oliphant made it impossible for
his sons to continue regular schooling William Burnes procured a few
textbooks such as Guthrie’s _Geographical Grammar_ and Stackhouse’s
_History of the Bible_ for their instruction. Despite the burden of
farm work the father managed at times to set regular lessons to be
conned at evening by the light of the kitchen fire or a tallow dip.
Robert and Gilbert helped to teach their younger brothers and sisters
to read and write; their own lessons included the use of a brief
religious catechism which their father had himself prepared with
Murdoch’s help, for William Burnes was a devout man. Even in boyhood
Burns, said Gilbert, was a reader when he could get books. He read
whatever he could get his hands on, however dull or ponderous it might
be, from theology to poetry. His own lists in his autobiography, highly
selective though they are, are proof enough. His first knowledge of
classical mythology, for instance, came from Andrew Tooke’s _Pantheon_,
an appallingly dull and didactic outline of Greek and Roman religion.
He never had Keats’s good fortune in discovering the Elizabethans:
his Homer was Pope’s and not Chapman’s. But he reached manhood with a
working knowledge of history and geography, a keen interest in current
affairs, and an acquaintance with literature which, though spotty, was
the more detailed because of its relatively narrow limits.
William Burnes’s effort to educate his children at home was part of
a family struggle which became one of the strongest influences in
forming his son’s character. The usual destiny of the children in a
peasant family was to be hired out at the age of ten or twelve as farm
servants. This fate, with its breaking of ties, cessation of schooling,
and frequent moral danger, William Burnes was determined to avoid
if possible. He was a stern father, but an affectionate one. John
Murdoch remembered his wrath at a labourer’s ‘smutty innuendoes’, and
his children knew that carelessness in word or deed would be sharply
rebuked. But they likewise remembered many acts of wordless affection,
as when during a thunderstorm the father came to sit with his daughter
Agnes because he knew she would be frightened.
When it became evident that the few acres at Alloway could not continue
to support his growing family, William Burnes rented from his old
employer, Provost Fergusson, the larger farm of Mount Oliphant. Gilbert
Burns, who seldom used superlatives, declared that Mount Oliphant was
almost the poorest land he had ever seen in cultivation. Yet for its
seventy bleak and stony acres William Burnes undertook to pay £40 a
year for the first six years of his lease, and £45 for the next six.
It may not be too uncharitable to assume that the Provost saw in the
tenancy of the stubbornly independent Burnes a chance to get a poor
farm raised to a better level of cultivation. At any rate he showed
his confidence in his tenant by advancing a hundred pounds towards
stocking the place. Without this help the venture would probably have
been impossible; nevertheless it saddled the family with an additional
load of debt. The weight of the burden can be realized from the fact
that in the 1770’s in nearby Clydesdale twopence a dozen was a fair
price for eggs, and chickens sold for sixpence a pair. Despite all
handicaps, however, things went fairly well for the first half of the
lease. In 1771 the family failed to take advantage of their privilege
of relinquishing the farm, and accordingly were committed to another
six years at an increased rental. Then began the series of disasters
which ultimately killed William Burnes and permanently undermined the
health of his eldest son.
Just at the onset of these dark days William Burnes, vexed at his
children’s bad handwriting, managed to send Robert and Gilbert, turn
about, to Dalrymple parish school for instruction in penmanship and
grammar, that they might be better qualified to teach their brothers
and sisters. By the following summer (1773), John Murdoch had returned
to Ayr and Robert was spared from the farm for three weeks’ additional
tutoring. The lad clutched at the opportunity like a famished man at
food. He was with Murdoch ‘day and night, in school, at all meals, and
in all [his] walks’. At the end of the first week, Murdoch says, ‘I
told him, that as he was now pretty much master of the parts of speech,
&c., I should like to teach him something of French pronunciation;
... and immediately we attacked the French with great courage. Now,
there was little else to be heard but the declension of nouns, the
conjugation of verbs, &c. When walking together, and even at meals, I
was constantly telling him the names of different objects, ... so that
he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases.
In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching, that it
was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in the business;
and about the end of the second week of our study of the French, we
began to read a little of the _Adventures of Telemachus_ in Fénelon’s
own words.’ How much French Murdoch really knew is doubtful, though
he later undertook to teach it in London, and apparently secured
some pupils until the Revolution filled the city with refugees who
captured the market. Burns ultimately acquired a reading knowledge of
the language, but if his riming ‘_respectueuse_’ with ‘Susie’ is a
specimen of the pronunciation Murdoch taught he would scarcely have
made himself understood in Paris.
Murdoch was this time most favourably impressed by Robert’s ability,
and, in his own inimitable language, regretted that at the approach of
harvest ‘Robert was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that
surrounded the grotto of Calypso, and, armed with a sickle, to seek
glory by signalising himself in the fields of Ceres; and so he did, for
although but about fifteen, I was told that he performed the work of a
man.’ Murdoch had seen no signs of the qualities which Burns afterwards
declared made him as a child by no means a favourite with anybody;
in his eagerness for learning he displayed only the retentive memory
and the enthusiastic ardour which would have most endeared him to the
pedantic master. The ‘stubborn ungainly something’ which later ripened
into pride was filling him with smothered rebellion against his lot in
life; the weeks with Murdoch opened for a moment a door through which
it seemed that he might escape. He was becoming class-conscious, and
was developing a hatred of stupid wealth and power which never left
him. His earliest associations with the sons of the gentry had not been
unpleasant, for these lads had not yet acquired ‘a just sense of the
immense distance between them and their ragged Playfellows’. ‘My young
superiours’, he said, ‘never insulted the clouterly appearance of my
ploughboy carcass, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all
the inclemencies of all the seasons.’ They gave him stray volumes of
books; one lad even helped him with his French. Nevertheless, he could
remember in manhood how as a mere child he almost choked with rage in
church one Sunday at the sight of a pretty servant-lass being compelled
to leave her pew to make room for the stupid son of her employer.