occasions for rage without going to church for them. Provost Fergusson
died in 1771, and the administration of his property fell into the
hands of a steward or factor. Fergusson had probably been lenient if
his tenant could not make payment in full on each quarter-day, but
it was the factor’s business to get in the rents, and if they were
not paid he wrote threatening letters to demand them. It is always
difficult for a debtor to see things from the creditor’s point of
view; for Robert Burns it was impossible. For him the factor was a
scoundrel, and his dunning letters were deliberate efforts to humiliate
the unfortunates in his power. Not but what the Burnes family had
reason for feeling resentful. They were doing everything that was
humanly possible, and more than was wise, to meet the factor’s demands.
They lived very poorly, even by Scottish peasant standards; meat was
almost unknown on their table; they gave up all hired help. At the
age of fourteen, as Murdoch noted, Burns was doing a man’s work,
guiding the clumsy plough, flailing out grain by hand, and performing
all the other tasks at which brute strength had to serve not merely
instead of machinery but instead of well-made tools. His gait became
the clumsy tread of the ploughman; his young shoulders developed a
permanent stoop from handling the awkward plough-stilts. But the worst
physical effect was invisible. The adolescent boy doing a man’s work
on insufficient food was incurably injuring his heart. When the lesion
began to manifest itself in dizziness and faintness Robert was not
sent to a doctor. Probably it would have made no difference if he had
been, for the trouble could scarcely have been diagnosed without a
stethoscope. Instead he used heroic measures which must have aggravated
the ailment. At one time he kept a tub of water beside his bed, and
when faintness came on him in the night he would take a cold plunge.
All his life he was plagued with fits of depression which he described
by the fashionable term, hypochondria. His heart lesion intensified the
nervous instability he had shown as a child, and thereby contributed to
the perennially reckless conduct of his manhood. In all his life, as in
his death, he continued to pay the heaviest share of the price of his
father’s struggle to hold on at Mount Oliphant.
A boy seldom realizes that he is overstraining himself. What
irked Burns at the time, far more than ‘the unceasing moil of a
galley-slave’, was the fact that he was almost wholly cut off from
social intercourse. Burns may not have been wholly an extrovert, but
he needed society as an outlet for his high spirits and as a refuge
from his low ones. In his earlier boyhood he had found friends both
among schoolfellows of his own rank and among the sons of neighbouring
gentlemen. At Mount Oliphant he was cut off. Murdoch would come out
on his half-holidays, ‘with one or two persons more intelligent than
[himself], that good William Burnes might enjoy a mental feast’.
This conversation of ‘solid reason, sensible remark, and a moderate
seasoning of jocularity’ was not what the boy needed. Robert and
Gilbert ‘began to talk and reason like men, much sooner than their
neighbours’, but this precocious maturity only made the lad more
acutely conscious of his own lack of advantages. He envied the greater
ease and assurance of his more fortunate fellows, and out of this envy
and self-consciousness grew the aggressive manner upon which some of
the gentry later remarked with disfavour.
As William Burnes’s tenure at Mount Oliphant neared its end the clouds
opened a little. The father had never wholly abandoned his hope of
providing his eldest son with some sort of education, and in the
summer of 1775 managed to send him for a few weeks to learn ‘dialling
and mensuration’ at Kirkoswald. Superficially the venture seemed as
fruitless as the earlier effort to learn French in three weeks. The
master, Hugh Rodger, was as pedantic as Murdoch, but inclined to be
harsh and sarcastic where Murdoch was earnest and encouraging. Though
Burns acquired some practical mathematics which later proved useful in
his Excise work, he found the more vivid part of his education outside
the classroom. With William Niven, a classmate of his own age, he
indulged in spirited impromptu debates on such adolescent topics as
‘Whether is a great general or a respectable merchant the most valuable
member of society?’ With a girl named Peggy Thomson he fell in love
briefly, but so violently as to disorganize his work during his last
days at school. Above all, he got glimpses of a sort of life very
different from the seclusion of Mount Oliphant.
In the later eighteenth century smuggling rated as one of the major
British industries. An excise tax of twenty shillings a gallon on
spirits set an even higher premium on illicit dealing than prohibition
did in the United States in the 1920’s. Few of the ‘best people’ had
any more scruples about dealing with smugglers than Americans had about
dealing with bootleggers. Nor was smuggling confined to liquors. Tea,
French silks and laces, and other goods on which the tariff was high
were also run in in quantity. The coast near Kirkoswald was a centre
for landing goods intended for the Ayrshire and Glasgow markets because
it was almost the last point smuggling vessels could approach without
grave risk of being trapped by the revenue cutters in the narrow waters
of the Firth of Clyde. Samuel Brown, the uncle with whom Burns stayed
at Kirkoswald, probably had a quiet share in the business; at any
rate his nephew saw plenty of smugglers. In the taverns where these
men spent the profits of their successful ventures Burns witnessed
roistering of a wilder sort than market nights at Ayr exhibited. His
extremely limited means, however, make it improbable that he often
looked unconcernedly on a large tavern bill, though ten years later
he thought he had. More likely the awkward youth was a spectator,
as the poet was at Poosie Nansie’s in 1785. A Shakespearian delight
in the salty flavour of raw humanity was one of Burns’s life-long
characteristics which first found expression at Kirkoswald. In 1783 he
wrote to John Murdoch, ‘I seem to be one sent into the world, to see,
and observe; and I very easily compound with the knave who tricks me of
my money, if there be anything original about him which shews me human
nature in a different light from anything I have seen before.’ His
respectable friends often deplored what seemed to them a depraved taste
for low company, but, as his best friend in Dumfries explained, it was
not the lowness of the company that attracted him; his companions were
of ‘low ranks, but men of talent and humour’. It was the colour of such
company, its shrewdness, its reckless wit, and its unashamed gusto
for life that made Burns prefer it to the drab respectability of the
church-going bourgeoisie.
Crude humanity, however, was not the only thing Burns studied at
Kirkoswald. He encountered some new books as well. Thomson’s _Seasons_
introduced him to the chief Scottish poet of the century who had made
his reputation by writing in standard English; Shenstone’s ‘Elegies’
and ‘The Schoolmistress’ initiated him into the poetry of sentiment,
and the Spenserian stanza of the latter gave him the verse-form for
‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. In reading these poets, however, he was
merely extending an acquaintance already made through the specimens in
Arthur Masson. His prose reading opened a different world. Novels were
not to be found in the stricter Presbyterian homes, so _Pamela_, an odd
volume of _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, and above all Mackenzie’s _The Man
of Feeling_, were a vivid experience. Nothing in his previous training
had inoculated him against the virus of sentimentality; exposed to its
most extreme form, he was infected for life. This, the lad no doubt
said to himself, was the way persons of superior sensitivity looked
upon life; very well, he could prove that his sensibility was equal
to theirs. At the first opportunity he bought a copy of _The Man of
Feeling_ and carried it with him everywhere until he wore it out.
Had Burns known more of literature and of the world he would have been
able to take Mackenzie’s sentiment at the proper discount. Then the
book’s influence might have been good. It might gently have corrected
the harshness of his peasant background, as the literature of sentiment
in general ameliorated the brutality of the eighteenth-century world.
As it was, the book set up a preposterous ideal which divided Burns’s
energies and sometimes vitiated his work. The crudities of peasant
life needed softening and elevating, but sentimentalism made many of
his efforts in this direction mawkish instead of humane. The poet who
portrayed an old farmer’s affection for a faithful mare was revealing
sentiment in the best sense of that much-abused word; the poet who
moralized over a ploughed-under weed was pumping up emotions such as
no real farmer ever felt. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that the
foundations for the weakest elements in his work, as well as for the
magnificent zest of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, were laid
at Kirkoswald.
Burns was probably right in saying that he came home considerably
improved. But he was also discontented. Mount Oliphant seemed narrower
and drabber than ever after the colour of the smuggling village, and
he had become acutely conscious--thanks equally to Peggy Thomson and
to his tavern companions--of his own awkwardness. This consciousness
led him to his first overt act of rebellion. In ‘absolute defiance’ of
his father’s commands, he attended a country dancing school, to improve
his manners. William Burnes’s ‘Manual of Religious Belief’ indicates
a willingness to mitigate some of the sterner points of Presbyterian
theology, but he was in full agreement with the Kirk’s condemnation of
worldly amusements. Gilbert Burns, as well as some of his brother’s
biographers, tried to explain away the remark about defiance, and the
father may not have pressed the point too far when he saw that Robert’s
mind was made up. Undoubtedly, however, Burns was correctly describing
his own feelings at the time, and though the father sensibly accepted
the accomplished fact and later allowed his other children to learn
dancing he thenceforth regarded his eldest son’s conduct with suspicion
and concern.
On leaving Kirkoswald Burns had undertaken to carry on a literary
correspondence with some of his schoolfellows. He was bent on improving
his powers of expression and acquiring a literary style. But the
medium he selected was prose. Probably in retrospect he exaggerated
the actual extent of this correspondence--it is hard to believe that
‘every post’ brought him as many letters as if he had been a merchant,
or that he could have paid the postage if it had. The few surviving
specimens are quite enough. The poet’s uncle had once set out to buy
one of the manuals of letter-writing which supply models for most of
the imaginable contingencies of human life; he brought home instead
‘a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Ann’s reign’. The exact
volume has never been identified, though Burns’s subsequent quotations
show that it included letters of Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. But the
eighteenth century, until Boswell taught it better, did not publish
really familiar letters. Such collections as Pope helped to bring out
were really composed of brief essays. Personal opinion was subdued;
personal news was deleted. The ‘unbridled effusions’ which make the
charm of familiar letters were suppressed. On such unfortunate models,
almost as stiff as Elizabeth Rowe’s ‘Letters Moral and Entertaining’
which he had found in his Masson, Burns set to work. The result was
the same as when he encountered _The Man of Feeling_. A youth bred
among literate people would have realized intuitively that these models
showed only one side of letter-writing. Burns, with no other standards
to measure them by, took them as the whole of the law and prophets,
and shaped his epistolary style accordingly. His ear, attuned to the
subtlest modulations of poetry, remained always deaf to the quieter
graces of prose: when Dugald Stewart commended the simplicity of
Franklin’s writing, Burns could see nothing in it, ‘when compared with
the point, and antithesis, and quaintness of _Junius_.’
Those who have judged Burns adversely as a letter-writer would have
still more grounds for their criticism had more letters survived like
the few to William Niven and Thomas Orr. These country youths admired
Burns’s solemn analyses of Pride and Courage and his exhortations to
be content with poverty; so, unfortunately, did the better-educated
friends of his later life. The letters which he transcribed for Lady
Harriet Don in 1787 and for Robert Riddell in 1791-93 belonged to
the same school of prose as his earliest epistles to Niven. Burns
would never have thought of making, nor his friends of asking for,
transcripts of the admirable discussions of Scottish song which he sent
to George Thomson, nor of his easier letters to John Ballantine and
Mrs. Dunlop. No epistolary Robert Fergusson ever came into his hands to
show him the way to a conversational style. When he wrote easy prose it
was in spite of his models and because he had something to say which
really demanded saying.
When the family at last escaped from Mount Oliphant in 1777 Burns was
eighteen, the age at which Chatterton, seven years before, had taken
his own life. But Burns’s self-education was a much slower process than
Chatterton’s. At eighteen he was still an awkward rustic, with all
his intellectual and artistic powers still to find. The most positive
result of the long ordeal at Mount Oliphant--apart from its injuries
to his health--had been the building up of a strong sense of family
loyalty. William Burnes had made every sacrifice to keep his family
together, and the feeling that this was a primary obligation had been
deeply impressed on his son. For the moment their prospects seemed
hopeful. The father had managed to lease the larger farm of Lochlie
near Tarbolton, and had again obtained from his landlord a cash advance
for stock and improvements. But again Burnes was paying the penalty of
his desperately independent character. For Lochlie’s hundred and thirty
acres of sour clay--so sour that the lease provided for two separate
applications of lime at the rate of 400 bushels to an acre--its
putative owner, David M’Lure, set a rental of £130. It was a ruinous
bargain which broke William Burnes’s spirit, helped to kill him, and
gave his children some first-hand acquaintance with the chicanery of
the law.
On Burns the first effect of the removal to Lochlie was social. The
farm was within easy reach of Tarbolton village, where he found the
companionship his nature craved. Of his friends at Mount Oliphant
James Candlish’s is the only name that has not perished; those of the
Tarbolton cronies are enshrined in both verse and prose. For the first
couple of years the records are almost blank. By his own testimony,
and Gilbert’s, he was constantly falling tempestuously in love,
usually with girls of his own rank, or below it, for ‘he had always
a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or who
had more consequence in life’. His imagination could always endow any
girl to whom he was attracted with a plentiful stock of charms which
bystanders often failed to perceive. His ready pen, moreover, was
constantly at the service of his less fluent friends who sought his aid
in composing their love-letters, and he ‘felt as much pleasure at being
in the secret of half the amours in the parish, as ever did Premier
at knowing the intrigues of half the courts of Europe.’ But Gilbert’s
testimony corroborates his own statement that none of these early
affairs passed the bounds of decorum. The fervours which he had first
experienced when reaping with Nellie Kilpatrick at the age of fifteen
were growing stronger and more clearly defined, but they were still
adolescent.
This adolescent Burns figures also in the proceedings of the Tarbolton
Bachelors’ Club, a social and debating society which he and a few
friends organized in the autumn of 1780. Its fragmentary records show
the youths arguing such windy topics as Burns had discussed with Niven
five years before, but with a more direct application to his own
walk of life. E. g., ‘Whether is the savage man or the peasant of a
civilized country, in the most happy situation?’ ‘Whether is a young
man of the lower ranks of life likeliest to be happy who has got a good
education, and his mind well informed, or he who has just the education
and information of those around him?’ ‘Whether between friends, who
have no reason to doubt each other’s friendship, there should be any
reserve?’ Such topics point to Burns as their propounder, as do some of
the Club’s rules. The one which barred religious topics was doubtless
in the interest of peace, but Burns’s hand is evident in the tenth and
last:
‘Every man proper for a member of this society must have a frank,
honest, open heart; above anything dirty or mean; and must be a
professed lover of one or more of the female sex. No haughty,
self-conceited person, who looks upon himself as superior to the rest
of the club, and especially no mean-spirited, worldly mortal, whose
only will is to heap up money, shall on any pretence whatever be
admitted....’
Indecorum of language was likewise barred, and clerical biographers
in discussing these rules have left the impression that the Club was
a kind of Y.M.C.A. From what we know of peasant life in Scotland and
of the adolescent male everywhere, it is possible that the biographers
were mistaken. Whatever his conduct in 1780, Burns was soon applying
the tenth rule in no platonic or idealistic sense.
Nevertheless the Club played an important part in developing his
powers. Besides giving him an audience for his ideas it showed him
that he could dominate his audience. Thenceforward Burns took the lead
in any social group where he was intimate; his companions, re-echoing
his wit, believed that they shared it and even convinced him that they
did. The roster of his friends includes many wholly commonplace people
like John Richmond and Robert Ainslie who shone only by reflected
light, but whose satellite nature Burns was quite unaware of at the
time. Moreover, the Club gave him almost his first experience of the
wine of applause, and he found it a heady vintage.
Among the Tarbolton Bachelors was David Sillar--not a charter member of
the Club, but admitted to it early in 1781. A year younger than Burns,
Sillar, under his friend’s inspiration, produced a few commonplace
poems which gave Burns the excuse for hailing him as brother poet.
Sillar had a certain gift for characterization in prose; he described
Tarbolton townsfolk as ‘uncontaminated by reading, conversation,
or reflection’, and left the most vivid extant picture of Burns on
the threshold of manhood. Burns was beginning to reveal the playboy
elements in his nature--that desire above all things to be conspicuous
which he shared with such very different geniuses as Sir Walter Scott,
Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Bernard Shaw. In a day when strict
Presbyterians still cropped their hair, after the fashion which in the
previous century had earned them the name of Roundheads, Burns let his
grow long and wore it in a queue--‘the only tied hair in the parish’.
When everyone else was wearing plaids of ordinary shepherd’s gray,
Burns sported one of dead-leaf colour. And since the uncontaminated
parishioners of Tarbolton were orthodox Old Lights Burns acquired easy
notoriety by setting up as a heretic.
Throughout his life Burns managed always to acquire a maximum of
ill-repute with a minimum of actual transgression. It was not so much
that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously.
Sometimes the conspicuousness was mere ill-luck. A fair portion, for
instance, of the Edinburgh gossip which clung to his name may well have
originated in the fact that both the servant girls with whom he had
relations in the city brought legal action against him--a consequence
he could scarcely have foreseen. On the other hand, his desire to
startle the parish frequently bore fruit in suspicions and enmities
impossible to live down. G. K. Chesterton once advised the village
genius who wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically
hostile and also very strong, not to come up to London but to stay at
home and have a row with the rector. This was precisely what Burns did.
The New Light doctrines which soft-pedalled such Calvinistic dogmas as
predestination had already conquered Edinburgh and Glasgow and were
beginning to invade the provinces. In any case Burns’s saturation
in the sentimentalism of Mackenzie and Sterne would have made him
receptive to the New Light emphasis on Benevolence and the Moral Sense.
But when the congeniality of the new doctrines was joined with an
opportunity to startle his neighbours the combination was irresistible.
He began, he says, to debate theology with such heat and indiscretion
as to raise a cry of heresy which persisted in Tarbolton and Mauchline
as long as he remained there. An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, pictures
him in the kirkyard between services, expounding heretical doctrines
with such vigour as to elicit hisses and cries of ‘Shame!’ from his
auditors. At least the story is true in spirit. Burns was determined to
be conspicuous, even if it meant hisses instead of applause.
Masonic affiliations, which after his return from Irvine supplanted
the Bachelors’ Club, gave him still another chance to indulge both
his social instincts and his sympathies with liberal thought. A rural
lodge like St. James’s at Tarbolton was, to be sure, no such centre of
political liberalism as were the Masonic lodges of the Continent during
the later eighteenth century. The chief activity, in fact, of most of
the Scottish lodges seems to have been convivial, with the additional
feature, lacking in the ordinary social club, that the members were
pledged to help their fellows in sickness or distress. Nevertheless the
knowledge that brother Masons in England and abroad were disseminating
ideas which challenged absolutism in government and religion must have
reached even village youths in Tarbolton. In Scotland, moreover, the
ritual which dignified the childish thrill of membership in a secret
organization gave Freemasonry an emotional appeal which the drab
services of the Kirk and the narrow routine of every day lacked. From
the time when he joined St. James’s Lodge, about 1782, until after his
sojourn in Edinburgh, Burns took his Masonic duties with the utmost
seriousness. He helped to put the struggling and almost bankrupt lodge
on its feet; from 1784 to 1787 he was its Depute Master. In Edinburgh
he continued his affiliations, and perhaps the highest moment of all
his early triumphal progress in the capital came at the meeting of the
Grand Lodge of Scotland on January 13, 1787, when the Grand Master gave
the toast, ‘Caledonia, and Caledonia’s Bard, brother Burns!’ It is
idle to conjecture if the coolness which followed his first acclaim in
Edinburgh reached into Masonic circles; certainly the poet’s interest
in the craft waned in his later years. His letters from Ellisland
and Dumfries scarcely mention it, except when he was in trouble and
wanted Robert Graham to help him as a Mason as well as a friend. He
duly affiliated himself with the Dumfries lodge, and became its Senior
Warden, but if silence means anything the zest was gone.