him, but without Irvine it might have been in a different way. Firmly
convinced as always of his own justice and rectitude--a conviction
which he imparted with equal vigour to his eldest son--William Burnes
was closing his long series of misfortunes in a violent contest with
his landlord, David M’Lure. The dispute had begun in a difference
over their respective shares of the expenses of liming and fencing
the farm and erecting new buildings. Pending arbitration of the case,
William Burnes had held up payment of his rent. In September, 1782, the
matter was submitted to James Grieve of Boghead and Charles Norval of
Coilsfield--chosen respectively by M’Lure and Burnes--for adjudication.
When they were unable to agree, John Hamilton of Sundrum was chosen as
‘Oversman’ or referee. Not until August, 1783, did Hamilton complete
his analysis of the accounts and hand down his decision, which was that
of £775 claimed by M’Lure, £543 was offset by credits for improvements
made by Burnes, part payments on rent, and other items. But before this
decision was rendered M’Lure, whose estates were heavily mortgaged to
the defunct Douglas and Heron Bank, and who desperately needed cash,
had tried to force payment by entering a sequestration on the stock
and crops of Lochlie. By the time John Hamilton reported, M’Lure was so
deep in debt that it was uncertain whether the rent belonged to him or
to his creditors. Thereupon indomitable William Burnes carried the case
to the Court of Session at Edinburgh. His first petition being thrown
out on a technicality, he renewed it, and at last, on January 27, 1784,
less than three weeks before his death, won his case. He had had the
cash on hand to deposit with the court, when he made his appeal, the
whole amount due; the decision absolved him of further responsibility
in the matter, and summoned the various claimants to bring in their
claims for adjudication. William Burnes had vindicated himself; his
view of his obligations had been upheld by the highest court in the
land. All that it had cost him was the last of his money and the last
of his strength. He was not an old man, but the long struggle for
livelihood, culminating in the protracted lawsuit, made him the easier
prey to tuberculosis. His conviction of his own rightness, like his
irascibility, grew stronger as his body weakened, and mingled with his
wrath at M’Lure was anxiety, bluntly expressed, over Robert’s growing
defiance of Presbyterian decorum.
In calmer circumstances, his father’s displeasure would have weighed
heavily on the poet’s mind, but now he was looking beyond it. Watching
their father’s sinking health, the children were consulting with
each other about their future. The end of Lochlie could not be long
delayed: death would evict them, because after the litigation none
of the claimants to the property was likely to give them a renewal of
the lease. Though Robert subsequently gave Gilbert the credit of being
a full partner in the next undertaking, he probably was not. It is
difficult to imagine the timid and subservient Gilbert taking the lead
in anything. Not long after returning from Irvine Burns had made the
acquaintance of a prosperous Mauchline lawyer named Gavin Hamilton, who
may have been attracted to the young farmer by reports of his outspoken
ridicule of the Old Lights in the Kirk. Hamilton being also a Mason,
they doubtless met first in the fellowship of square and compass. The
lawyer, already in hot water with his more orthodox neighbours, may
also have realized the potential value of Burns’s wit in the impending
contests, but whatever his motives it was Hamilton who suggested to
William Burnes’s children a practical and legal way out of their
trouble.
Several years before, Hamilton had rented Mossgiel farm, about three
miles from Mauchline, and had rebuilt the cottage as a country retreat.
The plan of being gentleman farmer as well as lawyer had palled, and
Hamilton now offered to sublet Mossgiel to Robert and Gilbert at a
lower rental--£90 a year for 118 acres--than they were paying at
Lochlie. The lease was quietly signed at Martinmas, 1783, it being
apparent by that time that William Burnes had not many weeks to live.
Secrecy was necessary; the Court of Session had not yet rendered its
decision, and their action, if it became known, might be unfavourably
construed. Whatever small savings had not gone for legal expenses were
invested in the new enterprise, and Hamilton pointed out a loop-hole
through which the children might salvage something after their father’s
death. Robert and Gilbert were already credited with the regular wages
of labourers. Let the other children also get themselves ranked as
employees on the farm. Then they could enter claims for unpaid wages
against their father’s estate, thereby becoming preferred creditors
who must be paid in full before M’Lure or his mortgagors got anything.
The scheme worked. Enough was saved from the wreck to enable the
family, shaken and desperately poor--when the youngest boy, John, died
in November, 1785, they could not raise the few shillings to pay for
the best mortcloth at his funeral--to re-establish their household at
Mossgiel, intact except for its head.
The new head was Robert, and in the months that followed his father’s
death the full results of his Irvine lessons showed for the first
time. In the two intervening years he had been too much oppressed with
labour and anxiety to have time or inclination to show the new spirit
in all its fullness, though he had shown enough to disturb his father.
Now he was free, and the fruits of his freedom were varied and not
always edifying. The earnest young debater of the Tarbolton Bachelors’
Club and the self-conscious author of essay-letters gave place to Rab
Mossgiel. Burns became the focus for a group of reckless youngsters,
most of them younger than himself, who looked up to him much as he had
looked up to Richard Brown three years before. Foremost in the group
were John Richmond and James Smith, both of them full of the animal
high spirits which so often disguise the basic commonplaceness of
young minds. Along with Burns they set out to scandalize the orthodox,
and succeeded. By the end of 1785 Richmond and Smith, like Burns, had
mounted the cutty-stool for fornication, and Richmond had fled from the
turmoil to the comparative sanctuary of an Edinburgh lawyer’s office.
These cronies are chiefly noteworthy as evidence of Burns’s still
uncritical mind. As with Bob Ainslie later, there was really nothing
to them except youthful exuberance. Their laughter was the ready
chorus for Burns’s wit; his sparkle made them shine with a reflected
light to which they actually contributed little. By comparison the
poor poetaster, Davie Sillar of the Tarbolton Bachelors, was almost
a genius. In his characterization of Tarbolton townsfolk Sillar
left behind him at least one quotable phrase, which is more than
any of the Mauchline group did. They cannot be charged with leading
Burns astray--if any leading was needed Burns supplied it--and their
biographical importance is negligible except as they gave him an
outlet for confidences which might not otherwise have been recorded.
When Burns went to Edinburgh he lodged with Richmond during his first
winter; during the second winter Richmond was in Mauchline a good part
of the time. Burns’s last extant letters to him reveal some details
about Jean Armour and her children, but lack the enthusiasm of the ones
written in 1786. Smith left Mauchline to engage in calico-printing
at Linlithgow. Failing there, he fled to the West Indies and died
obscurely, as Burns came so near doing. Both friendships were spent
and empty before the correspondence closed. The contrast between the
mediocre abilities of the two men and the quality of the poetry they
evoked from Burns is even more remarkable than the disparity between
the illiterate farm-lasses of Tarbolton and Mauchline and the lyrics
Burns addressed to them.
By the time he was twenty-six Burns’s status among people of his
own rank was firmly established. He was the unquestioned leader of
the reckless young; the welcome companion of ribald and unorthodox
elders. The attitude toward him of the staid and sober ranged from sad
head-shaking to violent denunciation. With people of rank above his
own, however, he was still uneasy. Hamilton was probably the first man
of the professional class with whom he formed a genuine friendship.
John Mackenzie, the Mauchline surgeon who attended William Burnes in
his last illness, remembered that on first visiting Lochlie he found
Gilbert frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative, the father
revealing the remains of an able mind beneath the cloud of illness
and distress, and the mother quiet, sagacious, and self-possessed.
But Burns sat glowering in a dark corner, ‘distant, suspicious, and
without any wish to interest or please’; scrutinizing Mackenzie and
obviously prepared to resent any display of superiority or patronage.
As the doctor showed himself affable Burns gradually thawed. Though
the written records of the friendship are meagre, Burns plainly liked
and trusted Mackenzie, and Mackenzie reciprocated. From the time of
their first meeting, the doctor declared, ‘I took a lively interest in
Robert Burns, and, before I was acquainted with his poetical power, I
perceived that he possessed very great mental abilities, an uncommon,
fertile and lively imagination, a thorough acquaintance with many
of our Scottish poets, and an enthusiastic admiration of Ramsay and
Fergusson. I have always thought that no person could have a just idea
of the extent of Burns’s talents who had not an opportunity to hear him
converse. His discrimination of character was great beyond that of any
person I ever knew....’ The surgeon introduced Burns as a poet to his
own friend and patron, Sir John Whitefoord, who had previously known
of the young farmer only as an earnest member of St. James’s Lodge;
he also gave an introduction to Captain Andrew Erskine of Edinburgh,
Boswell’s friend, and claimed to have been the first to bring the
Kilmarnock _Poems_ to the attention of Hugh Blair. It was to Mackenzie
and not to Gavin Hamilton that Burns turned for very practical help in
the stormy weeks preceding his final acknowledgement of his marriage
to Jean Armour, and when Mackenzie provided Jean and her lover with
quarters in his own house he must have faced a weight of criticism
from the embattled saints and gossips of the village that would have
daunted many a man with a professional status to maintain.
The pride which Richard Brown had taught to flow in proper channels
was becoming all the more touchy as Burns’s confidence in himself
increased. Sure of himself now among his equals, he was still
resentfully helpless when superiors rubbed in their superiority. He had
come as far as he could in his merely social capacity; what carried
him the rest of the way was his poetry. Here Gavin Hamilton more or
less unwittingly took the lead in introducing Burns to a new world.
The Kirk Session of Mauchline, seeking to re-establish the old-time
rigours of the Scottish Sabbath, had decided for once to make an
example of a prominent citizen instead of an obscure one. Accordingly
in the summer of 1784 Hamilton was summoned to stand trial for various
ecclesiastical crimes such as absenting himself from church, habitually
neglecting family worship, and causing a servant to dig new potatoes on
a Sunday. On being convicted, Hamilton promptly appealed his case to
the Presbytery of Ayr, and ultimately won it. How Burns intervened with
‘The Twa Herds’ has already been told. His authorship of that poem and
its successors was soon avowed as the manuscripts passed from hand to
New Light hand amid roars of Homeric laughter. People and institutions
accustomed to taking themselves and being taken by others with the most
intense seriousness are helpless in the face of mirth. Burns had found
the one weapon which the orthodox could not withstand, though they
could, and did, revenge themselves on the author of their humiliation.
The fury generated by his satires did as much as, or more than, the
odium of his personal sins to make Mauchline so unbearable that by 1786
Burns was ready to flee to Jamaica.
But if his satires made the village too hot for him they were also the
direct means of enabling him to escape both from the village and from
the ranks of the peasantry. One of the first friends to whom Hamilton
showed ‘The Twa Herds’ was another lawyer, Robert Aiken of Ayr, who
conducted and won Hamilton’s case before the Presbytery. Hamilton,
apart from the conviviality almost inseparable from a man of his
profession in eighteenth-century Scotland, was cool and businesslike.
Aiken was emotional and enthusiastic, a good forensic reader and
speaker, and an easy prey to sentiment. Pathos, in life or in a poem,
suffused his eyes with tears and set the buttons popping on his tight
waistcoat. But, like the more famous Man of Feeling, Henry Mackenzie,
Aiken seldom in daily life permitted sentiment to overcloud common
sense. Along with his fellow townsman, John Ballantine the banker, the
lawyer soon became the poet’s confidant and chief literary adviser.
‘Orator Bob’ lost no opportunity of reading his young friend’s verses
aloud, with such expression that Burns later declared he had never
fully appreciated his own work until he heard Aiken read it. As the
poet’s troubles thickened in the early months of 1786 it was with Aiken
and Ballantine that he discussed both his plans for emigration and
his arrangements for publishing his poems, their decision as to what
ought to be included in the Kilmarnock volume apparently being final.
Though Aiken’s action, as James Armour’s legal adviser, in cancelling
whatever ‘lines’ Burns had given Jean, caused a momentary chill, the
lawyer soon proved that his professional conduct did not interfere
with his private friendships. He obtained 145 subscriptions for the
Kilmarnock _Poems_--nearly one-fourth of the entire edition. Even amid
the excitement of his first dazzling fame in Edinburgh Burns recalled
with a glow of affection the kindly patronage of Aiken and Ballantine,
and long after he had quitted Ayrshire forever he continued from time
to time to send them new poems which he thought they might like. As
late as 1791 he was still gratefully remembering Ballantine’s part
in handing him ‘up to the “Court of the Gentiles” in the temple of
Fame’--a figure of speech which combined neatness and literal accuracy.
It was only to the outer court--that of the bourgeoisie and minor
gentry--that Aiken and Ballantine were able to conduct him.
The association with Hamilton fared worse. Poetry, except in the form
of humour and satire, did not, it would seem, appeal to Hamilton as it
did to Aiken, and between him and Burns was always the barrier of their
business relation as landlord and tenant. Ultimately, indeed, a matter
of business estranged them. In the spring of 1788, nearly two years
after Gilbert Burns had become the sole lessee of Mossgiel, Hamilton
apparently asked Burns to become his brother’s surety. The poet, who
was lending Gilbert nearly half the proceeds of the Edinburgh _Poems_,
declined to commit himself any further:
‘The language of refusal is to me the most difficult language on
earth, and you are the man of the world, excepting One of R^t
Hon^{ble} designation [i. e., Lord Glencairn], to whom it gives me the
greatest pain to hold such language.... I never wrote a letter which
gave me so much pain in my life, as I know the unhappy consequences: I
shall incur the displeasure of a Gentleman for whom I have the highest
respect, and to whom I am deeply oblidged.’
The foreboding was justified. After that reluctant refusal, Burns’s
relations with his former landlord never regained their old cordiality.
In his contacts with Aiken, Ballantine, Hamilton, and certain of the
New Light clergy Burns had, by the spring of 1786, taken a further
step in the realization of his own capacities. He found himself quite
at ease, at least in male company, among members of the professional
class to whom as a lad he had looked up with awe. He was discovering,
moreover, that he was not their inferior in native ability. Though he
did not know it then, he had in fact reached as high a level as he was
ever to maintain in Scottish society. These lesser gentry not only
received him, but treated him as an equal. The higher gentry--people
of estates and pedigrees--the higher professional classes, and the
nobility, might receive him for a time, but always with a latent
condescension. Sooner or later, even with Mrs. Dunlop, even with
Robert Riddell, some incident would reveal that their feeling toward
him was after all _de haut en bas_. The friends whom he kept among men
of social and professional standing, from Aiken and Ballantine at the
beginning of his career to Alexander Findlater and John Syme at its
close, were gentlemen, were men of education, but they were not, in
Burns’s favourite capitalized phrase, Great People.
But in the summer and autumn of 1786 it seemed there might be no limit
to Burns’s social advancement. As he went about the country during
August and September, collecting the subscriptions for his poems, the
parish outcast of a few months earlier found himself everywhere courted
and applauded. New acquaintances and old united to draw him out, and
the bolder his remarks the better they liked them. But he was still
capable of awe. In October came an invitation to dine on the 23rd at
Catrine House, country home of Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral
Philosophy in Edinburgh University. The company included Basil William,
Lord Daer, the flighty and consumptive but liberal-minded son and heir
of the Earl of Selkirk. In an amusing set of verses Burns described
how, at the prospect of meeting a peer for the first time, his knees
shook as he sidled into the Professor’s drawing-room, and he reverted
to his old trick of watching from a corner until he had taken the
measure of the company. The incident is worth mentioning because it was
probably the last time Burns was ever unsure of himself in society.
In later months and years he was often irritated and uncomfortable
when members of the upper classes emphasized their elevation, but
such feelings were the reverse of awe. Two months after the dinner at
Catrine he was meeting professors and peers by the dozen instead of
the brace, and was maintaining not merely self-possession but critical
appraisal.
Burns’s standards of social intercourse, as of so many other things,
were firmly established before the surviving records become full
enough for detailed study. They were as honest and straight-forward
as the rest of his dealings. Except for the brief embarrassment of a
first meeting, rank as such meant nothing to him. What he demanded,
and all he demanded, of any man was, in his own phrase, that he have
something to him. That something must be native; a matter of mind and
personality, not of social place. A Souter Johnie was better company
than a Hugh Blair, because the cobbler’s wit and wisdom were the
product of native shrewdness dealing with first-hand experience; the
professor’s attainments were ‘meerly an astonishing proof what industry
and application can do’. To his cultured friends, Burns seemed to have
a perverse taste for low company, whereas his real quest was genuine
company. His own unbridled wit and tempestuous emotions naturally made
him gravitate towards other similarly endowed people, who too often
were not pillars of society, but this was not his reason for choosing
them. When a pillar of society bore himself ‘to all the Actors, high
and low, in the drama of Life, simply as they merited in playing their
parts’, and excelled in telling a story--in other words, when the
pillar was Dugald Stewart--Burns enjoyed his company as much as John
Rankine’s or Willie Nicol’s. Nor was wit or waggishness necessarily
demanded. Grave wisdom Burns could relish as well as gay, though not
in every mood; what he could never endure was dullness, pomposity, or
conceit.
As the autumn of 1786 wore on, new friends and old agreed that the
success of the Kilmarnock _Poems_ should make Burns abandon his flight
to Jamaica. He ought to publish a second edition in Edinburgh and then
settle down, either on a farm of his own, or--as Aiken suggested--in
the Excise service. The poet would find plenty of friends to help
him win a hearing, and publishing in the capital would give him a
national instead of a local audience. Burns must have made up his mind
immediately after his dinner with Dugald Stewart. Among his new friends
was Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Renfrewshire estates of the Earl
of Glencairn. On November 1 Dalziel wrote to congratulate Burns on
abandoning the West Indian venture and to tell him that he had showed
the _Poems_ to the Earl himself. The Earl bought a copy, which he
had richly bound, and expressed warm interest in the poems and their
author.
Thus began Burns’s most successful acquaintance with a peer--the only
association of the sort which did not sooner or later end in apathy
on one side and humiliation on the other. Though the circumstances of
Burns’s earliest introduction to Edinburgh society are obscure, the
obscurity is lightened if we take at face value the poet’s repeated
statements that he owed everything to Glencairn--that the Earl, as he
put it, took him by the hand and led him up to fame. Burns afterwards
said that he went to the city without letters of introduction, but
that can have been true only in the narrowest sense. Dalziel certainly
apprised Glencairn of Burns’s plans, as Dr. Mackenzie apprised Sir John
Whitefoord and Andrew Erskine, and as the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun
apprised the blind poet, Thomas Blacklock. Dugald Stewart also must
have known of the decision. Within a week of his arrival, Burns was the
lion of the Edinburgh season. Many new friends must have contributed to
such immediate success, but the poet’s emphasis on Glencairn’s kindness
marks the Earl as the man who secured the patronage of the fashionable
Caledonian Hunt, and probably also as his sponsor in Masonic society.
All this the Earl succeeded in doing without offending the touchy poet
by condescension, though Burns’s pride sometimes suffered because of
Glencairn’s deference to people of superior rank. Once, indeed, Burns
was ‘within half a point’ of throwing down his ‘gage of contemptuous
defiance’ because the Earl was giving too much attention to a wealthy
dunderpate, but even then he was quickly reassured as to Glencairn’s
sincere good wishes. Touchiness aside, Burns’s position in Edinburgh
recalls Benjamin Franklin’s at Versailles a decade before. In each
place the fashionable world thought it had discovered a child of
nature; in each place the newcomer had really a shrewder mind and a
quicker penetration of character and motive than most of the _élite_
who patronized him. The contrast between Burns’s attitude toward
Glencairn and toward his fellow peer, the Earl of Buchan, shows how
thoroughly the poet had learned to take men’s measure regardless of
rank. Buchan also had professed great interest in Burns and was lavish
with advice, but Burns recognized the man as an egotistical windbag
and received his advice with an elaborate irony of compliment which
would have betrayed itself to anyone less conceited than the busybody
who once, when Sir Walter Scott lay ill, volunteered to arrange his
funeral, and who, when he himself had written some amazingly bad
verses, accepted as a tribute John Taylor’s publication of them in a
part of _The Scots Magazine_ ‘distinct from the mass of vulgar poetry’.
Nevertheless, Burns’s deference to Glencairn had unfortunate results.
In securing William Creech, his brother’s former tutor, as Burns’s
publisher, Glencairn thought he was doing the best possible good turn.
Yet the outcome was months of vexation and delay for the poet, and the
loss of all profits from later editions of his poems. Moreover, the
poet had soberly decided that his best hope for a livelihood lay in
securing an Excise post which would support him while he banked his
profits as a reserve fund for his children. But Glencairn, like Mrs.
Dunlop and other gentry whose knowledge of the lives of tenant farmers
was limited to the quarterly receipt of their rents, was all for the
poet’s investing his capital in a farm of his own. Disapproving of
the Excise scheme, Glencairn would do nothing to forward it, though
a word from him in the right place--that is, in the ears of Henry
Dundas--would have procured Burns the appointment he sought. As it
was, all hints fell dead, while meantime Patrick Miller dangled the
bait of Ellisland. When at last Burns interested a man willing to
help the Excise plan, the mischief was already done; he was committed
to the undertaking which swallowed all his little capital. The best
intentions of his would-be patrons kept turning to evil for Burns;
even Glencairn’s gift of a diamond-pointed pencil made trouble by
supplying the poet with the means of inscribing blazing indiscretions
on window-panes.