forgetting his obligations as a member of the Bachelors’ Club. His
own statements and Gilbert’s, already quoted, show a succession
of passing infatuations with various girls whose names, even, are
doubtful, and of whose personalities the most ardent legend-mongers
can scarcely summon up a wraith. By comparison with such shadows as
Anne Rankine and Mary Morison, even Nellie Kilpatrick who stirred the
poet’s blood for a single harvest, and Peggy Thomson, who overset his
trigonometry at Kirkoswald, are three-dimensional. The one figure who
half emerges from the shadows is Alison (or Ellison) Begbie. Burns met
her in 1780 or 1781, but understanding of the matter is not clarified
by the possibility that some of the five letters supposed to have
been addressed to her may really be drafts of the love-letters he
frequently wrote for his friends. Assuming them all to be Alison’s,
they prove mainly that Burns had not yet learned much about women. If
ever farm-lass was wooed in such stilted and temperate phrases it is
pretty certain that she was not in this humour won. Burns’s intentions
were serious; he wanted to marry Alison. Unfortunately the intentions
made him serious too. He seemed afraid to commit himself in writing.
A bystander is not surprised that Alison refused the man who told her
that her company never gave him those giddy raptures so much talked of
among lovers, and who announced that in his opinion married life was
only friendship in a more exalted degree. It did surprise Burns. Indeed
the shock of it led him subsequently to charge her with having jilted
him, a difficult feat when his own letters prove she had never accepted
him. No doubt she had merely employed the ancient technique of mild and
noncommittal encouragement while she was making up her mind. Burns had
prided himself on his skill in letter-writing and on his address with
women. To be flatly rejected the first time he made a serious proposal
upset him for several months. It also completed his sentimental
education. Thereafter, until he met Clarinda, he knew better than to do
his courting by post.
But friendships with men and women, though they helped him momentarily
to escape his blue devils, could not obscure the problem of his own
and his family’s future. He still lacked an aim. Conscious of more
than average powers in himself, he had no purpose to which to direct
them. Moreover, the years at Lochlie were bringing him for the first
time to a realization of the workings of the larger economic laws.
The American War was ruining the West of Scotland. Half its market
for manufactured goods was closed; its exports to the West Indies
were being raided by American privateers. Just before the war an
over-expanded bank had failed, dragging down with it half the gentlemen
in Ayrshire and leaving a trail of wreckage which was not wholly
obliterated for a couple of decades. Even the wartime demand for farm
produce was no help when multitudes of jobless artisans could not
pay the high prices which at best would scarcely have yielded a fair
return on the over-capitalized land. M’Lure, the landlord of Lochlie,
was heavily mortgaged to the defunct bank. Hard pressed for cash, he
tried to extort from his tenants more than was his due. William Burnes
resisted, and became involved in litigation which followed him to the
grave. In similar circumstances at Mount Oliphant Burns had seen merely
a personal situation in which a villainous factor was demanding more
rent than the family could pay. Now he began to realize that a man may
be frugal and diligent in his business, and yet be destroyed by forces
which he did not start and was powerless to control.
As early as 1780 Burns had experimented at growing flax of his own on
a few acres of land subleased from his father; later he won a prize
for his seed. His success led him in 1781 to go to Irvine to learn
the trade of flax-dressing. Some consequences of that venture belong
in the next chapter; educationally the results, like those of so many
youthful experiences, were mainly negative. His distaste for the work,
and its ill effect on his health, left him more aimless than before. He
concluded that he was unfit for the world of business, and where he had
formerly yearned for some chance of advancement he now decided that he
was destined to be only a looker-on at life. All that restrained him
from complete shiftlessness was his sense of responsibility for his
family.
Intellectually, that sense was keener and more insistent than ever,
but now for the first time it was in direct conflict with a storm of
emotions. Burns had come home empty-handed as the prodigal, to find
his father visibly sinking under the united effects of worry and
tuberculosis. It was plain that even if his contest with his landlord
should be decided in his favour he would never be fit to undertake
another farm. By the beginning of 1783 the whole family, including
William Burnes, realized that death was at best a matter of months.
M’Lure the landlord realized it too, and such scenes as had accompanied
the reading of the factor’s letters at Mount Oliphant were re-enacted
at Lochlie with triple poignance. The children were old enough this
time to understand the whole meaning of the affair; their father was a
broken man, and where the factor had merely threatened legal action,
M’Lure was taking it. The outcome of the case and the practical means
whereby Gavin Hamilton helped the family through the crisis will be
told later; its emotional impact on Burns himself, coming as it did on
the heels of his own failure at business, could hardly be overstated.
He saw his father’s lifetime of struggle for independence ending in
defeat and despair. Recollection of Mount Oliphant and Lochlie never
ceased to haunt his own ventures as a farmer, and helped to damn them.
Fear and hatred of one’s economic position are seldom the heralds of
success.
Burns’s whole nature, in fact, was beginning to cry out against the
life he was expected to lead. Not even the loyally accepted burden
laid upon him from his father’s weakening hands could hold him steady.
He had come back from Irvine, as before from Kirkoswald, incapable of
fitting again into the narrow pattern of the life he had lived before
his departure. He had outgrown his mould. The dying father noted with
concern that his son was spending longer hours with wilder companions,
and displaying a new aggressiveness and assurance in his manner of
speaking with women. Nevertheless the shadow of the old man’s authority
was still enough, when reinforced by the desperate need of securing
the future of the family, to inhibit the full expression of the new
tendencies. Gilbert’s testimony is explicit. At Lochlie he and Robert
were both allowed the usual labourer’s wage of £7 a year, against which
was charged the value of every piece of clothing manufactured at home.
Neither there nor at Mossgiel did Robert’s expenditures exceed this
frugal sum. It was extravagance of emotion, of speech and conduct, not
of expense, that beset the poet.
On his deathbed, on February 13, 1784, William Burnes muttered that
there was one member of his family for whose future conduct he feared,
and Robert, in tears, took the admonition to himself. Hardly was the
family settled at Mossgiel, after some strictly legal dodging which
must have increased the poet’s inward distaste for the whole business,
when the traits his father had dreaded began their full play. Though
he entered on his responsibilities as head of the family with the
best of resolutions, his heart was not in the undertaking. He read
farming books, calculated crops, and attended markets, but his mind
was elsewhere. According to his own account, he lost interest in the
work because of two successive crop-failures, the first owing to bad
seed and the second to a wet harvest. But this was an excuse, not
an explanation. The real reasons lay within himself. They were his
passions and his art.
His father’s death had removed the last check upon social indulgence.
Always shunning the solitude which produced brooding melancholy, he
had found in Mauchline a new and gayer set of cronies whose company
was more congenial than that of his family in the crowded cottage
at Mossgiel. More and more of his time was spent in the village
taverns--not for drunkenness, but for the pleasure of sharing the
hilarity of careless youths and the uninhibited wit of older ‘men
of talent and humour’ like his neighbour John Rankine. The rigidly
righteous began to frown on the young farmer whose reckless sallies
were sure to provoke the wildest outbursts of laughter. And even at
Mossgiel there were distractions from a sober and godly life. The
household included a young servant-lass named Betty Paton, whose
charms, like those of most of Burns’s sweethearts, were mainly
physical. Within a few months of his father’s death Betty became
Burns’s mistress, and in May, 1785, bore his first child amid all the
accompaniments of a public scandal in the parish.
Unpropitious though such beginnings were for a career as a tenant
farmer, they were relatively unimportant compared with the inner
compulsions arising from his discovery of his poetic vocation. Many
another young farmer had sowed his wild oats and then settled down to
rear a legitimate family and become an elder in the Kirk. For Burns
such a future had really ceased to be possible even before he left
Lochlie. In April, 1783, under the melancholy influence of his own
ill-health and his father’s dark prospects, he had begun to keep a
commonplace book with the avowed intention of some day showing the
world that a young ploughman, little indebted to scholastic education,
was nevertheless capable of rime and reason. When he started the book
his literary models were Shenstone, Mackenzie, and the folk-songs of
his country. At some time during the next year, however, the poems of
Robert Fergusson came into his hands. They roused him as Chapman’s
Homer roused Keats. For the first time he realized that the Scottish
dialect might be something more than a dying relic of the past. He
had been long acquainted with Allan Ramsay, but Ramsay belonged to
the primitive age before Scottish letters had been ennobled by such
geniuses as Henry Mackenzie, James Beattie, and John Home. Now he found
that Fergusson, only ten years older than himself, had returned to the
speech and the verse-forms of Ramsay. And Fergusson was no country
boy but an educated lawyer’s clerk bred in the Athens of the North.
Reading these poems Burns realized their vivid descriptions and their
wit--realized also that what Fergusson had done he could do as well, or
better. Mauchline parish offered as many themes for homely satire as
Edinburgh did.
The theme ready to hand was ecclesiastical controversy. The
neighbourhood was ululating with disputes between Old Lights and New
Lights, and the leaders on both sides were behaving with the lack of
charity peculiar to Christians on the war-path. Moreover, Burns’s
landlord and friend, Gavin Hamilton, was in the thick of it, standing
trial before the Kirk Session on a charge of Sabbath-breaking. Two
neighbouring Old Light ministers--John Russell of Kilmarnock and
Alexander Moodie of Riccarton--chose this time for a quarrel over
parish boundaries, and conducted their holy row with the heat and
personal invective of a heresy-hunt. Burns improved the occasion by
composing ‘The Twa Herds’. Copying the poem in a disguised hand he
showed it to Hamilton, remarking with studied gravity that he had no
idea who the author was, but that he thought it pretty clever. Hamilton
thought so too. Copies were passed from hand to hand; the New Lights,
clergy as well as laity, received it with roars of applause; the Old
Lights were correspondingly furious.
When Burns followed up ‘The Twa Herds’ with ‘The Holy Fair’, ‘The
Ordination’, and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, the applause redoubled, and so
did the enmity of the Old Lights. The man who challenges established
institutions to their face needs to be sure of his own position.
Burns’s indiscretion with Betty Paton not only left him wide open
to counter-attack but assured him of far more unpleasant notoriety
than ordinarily accompanied such lapses in peasant Scotland. It was
impossible to remain in the parish without submitting to the discipline
of the Kirk. Even at its mildest the ordeal of three successive
penitential appearances before Mauchline congregation would have been
intensely humiliating to a man as sensitively proud as Burns. But
a young bachelor’s slips from grace were not usually treated very
seriously except by the clergy and the Holy Willies. Had Burns been
otherwise in good standing in the community he would have been able to
go on much as before, but when the evidence of his breach of sexual
morality was augmented by his ill-fame as a derider of the church he
became, among all the more conservative members of the parish, little
better than an outcast.
He may not have realized the full bitterness of the feeling against
him until his repudiation by the Armours in the spring of 1786, but he
realized enough. His reaction was as inevitable as the community’s had
been. If he was to be an outcast he would live up to his reputation.
Many of his biographers since, as well as many of his neighbours at
the time, have taken at face value the blatant pride in his ill-repute
which marks such poems as the ‘Epistle to John Rankine’. But this
was not part of his real nature; he was simply brazening out his
humiliation. The unco guid had decided that he was a dog with a bad
name. He would show them that they had underestimated his capacity to
shock them. That in the process he would make the parish too hot to
hold him was a consideration not likely to occur to him in the full
tide of his resentment.
But if his conflict with the Kirk had brought him humiliation it had
also brought him the sense of power and the intoxication of applause.
He had long known that his conversational wit and fire could dominate
a knot of cronies. Now he had learned that he could write things which
stirred both the laughter and the deeper emotions of educated men as
well as of his social equals. The hostility of the Holy Willies was
even more inebriating than the applause of Gavin Hamilton and his
friends. Men do not hate unless they fear; the measure of his success
and power was the measure of the antagonism he had aroused. The youth
whose weakness it had always been to lack an aim had found one now.
His education was complete. Intimate observation and experience of a
small community had acquainted him with human nature, and had at last
roused him to realization of his own capacities and his true vocation.
His estimate of himself and his work, he later told John Moore, was
pretty nearly as high in 1785 as it was two years later, after all the
adulation of Edinburgh. All that he needed now was the opportunity to
display his talents on a larger stage.
III
MEN
Burns entered on his manhood at Irvine in 1781. Before his ill-starred
venture as a flax-dresser he was an aimless and inarticulately
rebellious youth; after it, though he was still aimless for a time,
his rebellion against the narrow world of his origin was overt and
vocal. Yet even under the stimulus of Irvine he was long in finding his
proper speech. When he wrote the earliest of his extant letters, Burns,
already a man in years, was still a boy in mind. His self-conscious
disquisitions on such high-resounding themes as Pride and Courage mark
him as less mature at twenty-one than Chatterton was at sixteen; he
had passed the age at which Keats died before he began to say anything
worth heeding. At twenty-two, his vague aspirations momentarily
focussed on the idea of establishing himself in business as a necessary
prelude to matrimony, he made his sole attempt at living according to
the standards of a working-day world. Materially, the attempt was an
abject failure; spiritually, it set him on the direct road to realizing
himself.
Knowledge of the material side of the Irvine partnership is limited
to what Burns himself told in his autobiographic letter, which is
not wholly reliable evidence. Not that Burns intentionally coloured
the facts. The safest rule in reading his letters is to take it for
granted that if he said a thing about himself it was true; if he
said a thing about someone else, he believed it to be true. But to
his passionate temperament and ‘skinless sensibility’ (the phrase is
his own) anyone through whom he suffered loss or humiliation became
almost automatically a villain of the blackest. Hence his charges that
Peacock, his Irvine partner, ‘was a scoundrel of the first water, who
made money by the mystery of thieving’, need not be taken literally.
Burns, a complete greenhorn at business, may possibly have been taken
in by an unscrupulous rascal, but it is equally possible that Burns
in retrospect blamed Peacock for a failure in which they were both
at fault. In any case, the business side of these months influenced
Burns’s future only as it convinced him of his unfitness for ‘the
little chicaning art of bargain-making’. What really mattered were the
new friends, and the new ideas of himself and his place in the world
inspired by these friends and by the introspection resulting from
ill-health.
Chief of the new friends was the sailor, Richard Brown, whom Burns
looked up to as a junior schoolboy looks to the athletic senior. Brown
was about the poet’s age, but had all the worldly experience Burns
lacked. He was better educated than most seamen of his day, though
perhaps his story of having been patronized by a wealthy man who
promised to set him up in life was only another sailor’s yarn. He had
at any rate abilities of a sort. An incompetent man could not have
become the master of a West Indiaman while still in his twenties. But
in 1781 that promotion was still to win. Brown just then was down on
his luck. His ship had recently been captured by an American privateer,
and he had been put ashore on the coast of Connaught with nothing but
his life and the clothes he wore. Nevertheless the friendship with
Burns probably began with something of patronage on Brown’s part.
The experienced, far-travelled, and distinctly hard-boiled sailor
was interested in the awkward, stoop-shouldered country lad who in
company alternated between sullen silence and--if he felt himself at
ease--unusually vivid and copious speech. Obviously Brown realized
that there was something in him; obviously also he took pleasure in
enlightening him as to the ways of the world. Burns saw in Brown ‘every
noble, manly virtue’ and strove to imitate him. Burns was already
proud; Brown taught his pride to flow in proper channels--whatever
that may mean. But Brown also was the only man the poet ever met who
was a bigger fool than himself where women were concerned. The various
goddesses by whom Burns’s tinder heart was continually lighted up still
roused a hobbledehoy calf-love, as adolescent as his hero-worship
of the sailor. Brown taught him that direct action might usually be
counted on to bring results, and here, as Burns later admitted, the
friendship did him a mischief.
Yet Brown was something more than a hard-boiled sailor initiating a
green youngster. One Sunday afternoon the pair took a walking trip to
Eglinton Wood, where under the inspiring influence of a spot associated
with the memory of Sir William Wallace Burns confided to his mentor
that he occasionally tried to write poetry. He was already poet enough
to have a copy in his pocket. Brown listened, and declared that verses
of such merit ought to be sent to a magazine. It was actually this,
Burns recorded long afterwards, that first gave him the idea that he
might amount to something as a poet. It was one thing to have one’s
verses praised by a rural maiden like Nellie Kilpatrick or by one’s own
admiring family; it was quite another to have them endorsed by a man of
the world. Unfortunately Burns failed to name the poem Brown commended.
At a guess it may well have been the two somewhat bawdy stanzas
beginning ‘I murder hate by field or flood’, Andrew Dunlop’s manuscript
of which was headed, ‘On the great Recruiting in the year 17-- during
the American war’. Burns had no motive for mystifying Dunlop; hence
the date of these stanzas can scarcely be later than 1781, and Brown
would have been more likely to applaud such lines than the conventional
religious pieces more or less contemporary with them.
The good as well as the ill of Brown’s friendship belongs to the six or
eight months at Irvine. If the friends met during the next four or five
years, no references to their intercourse survive. When the Kilmarnock
_Poems_ were published, Brown received the only inscribed presentation
copy on record, and in December, 1787, the two began a correspondence
which lasted for a couple of years in the intervals of Brown’s voyages.
Their only recorded meeting, however, was in Glasgow in February, 1788,
when the poet told Brown all about Jean Armour. Burns’s last letter,
in November, 1789, in reply to a complaint about his silence, is as
cordial as ever, yet the friendship ended. According to tradition,
Burns’s charge about Brown’s moral influence had reached the sailor,
now a married man with a steadily improving position to maintain and
far from eager to be reminded that he had heard the chimes at midnight.
After Brown’s death, the presentation copy was found hidden away in
the back of an old sideboard. The sailor was not the only friend who
in later years wanted to live down his associations with the poet.
The descendants of John Wilson concealed for more than a century the
fact that instead of resenting ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’ he appealed to
Burns for help when his position as schoolmaster at Tarbolton became
intolerable. On the other hand, James Humphry of Mauchline continued
till his dying day to boast that he was ‘Burns’s bletherin’ bitch’.
During the same months in which Brown was stirring Burns to a new
self-confidence his health was producing opposite effects. Throughout
his life his diseased heart reacted unfavourably to nervous stress; the
Irvine experience was the first of many. Realization of his bad bargain
with Peacock combined with the unaccustomed strain of dusty indoor
labour to bring on a period of ‘hypochondria’--in other words, nervous
depression resulting from defective heart-action. Its tangible results
were such lachrymose verses as the ‘Prayer in the Prospect of Death’
and the letter to his father in which he announces that he is ‘quite
transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall
bid an eternal adiew to all the pains, and uneasiness, and disquietudes
of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it.’ The
letter is not merely morbid, it is adolescent; and Mrs. Carswell has
noted that the solemn announcement that ‘I am not formed for the bustle
of the busy nor the flutter of the Gay’ is cribbed verbatim from _The
Man of Feeling_. William Burnes, however, probably regarded it as
admirable proof that his son was beginning to take serious views of
religion and life. In any case it represents only a passing mood of
ill-health. The important fact about the Irvine days is that Burns was
considering seriously his own abilities and his future position.
The partnership had at least the merit of a dramatic and even
spectacular finish. A New Year’s Eve celebration, whatever it may have
done for Burns, brought his partner and his wife to such a state of
drunkenness that they knocked over a lamp and set fire to the shop.
The place was completely burned out, and after a month or two Burns
returned to Lochlie poorer than he went, but with a rich store of
experiences, a new outlook on life, and a mature confidence in himself
which he had never before possessed. But he still lacked an aim. For
another four years the pride which Brown had taught to flow in proper
channels was still to display itself mainly in obscure rebellion
against his lot in life, and in anything but obscure defiance of the
unco guid.