as he did Glencairn and Buchan. He was measuring himself and his
native ability against them, and was not inclined to award himself
second place. But he was not comfortable with most of them. Even if
they did not offend him by overt condescension he was fully aware that
they received him only because he was the fad of the moment. When the
novelty staled he could not hope to continue many friendships in
exalted quarters. The tide of popularity had swept him higher than he
could expect to remain; its ebb might leave him stranded far lower than
he deserved. It was not long, indeed, before his hosts began to find
things to criticize. Burns not only said what he thought, he said it
with an emphasis they found unbecoming in a man of peasant birth. The
great Doctor Johnson could be as gruff as he pleased with his Scottish
hosts because he was Johnson; Lord Braxfield could roar and Lord Kames
rave, both bawdy, in a gentleman’s home because they were Lords of
Session; for Burns to express emphatic opinions argued a lack of the
humility which beseemed a ploughman entertained by his betters.
The fact was that Burns lacked both the finesse which would have
enabled him neatly and inoffensively to deal with snubs, and the
insensitive egotism which could have ignored them. No one could snub
the Ettrick Shepherd, because his magnificent self-esteem made it
impossible for him to see any remark in anything but a complimentary
light. One did not safely snub Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, because
that wasp could sting. Burns’s pride, unfortunately, not only made
him sensitive; it made him aggressive and heavy-handed. When he
flaunted the blue-and-buff of the Whigs he was going out of his way
to assert his independence among people who were mostly Tories; when
he told a lady, who had not waited an introduction before inviting
him to her party, that he would come if she would also invite the
learned pig from the Grassmarket, he was making a show of himself in
one way in the very act of resenting being made a show in another.
The consciousness that he was acting a part--whether behaving like a
country bumpkin in Smellie’s printing-house, or posing as the Bard of
Nature in drawing-rooms--no doubt partly explains some of his more
violent outbursts. Thus when he demolished a clergyman, whose niggling
criticisms of Gray had goaded him beyond endurance, with the Johnsonian
thunderbolt, ‘Sir, I now perceive a man may be an excellent judge of
poetry by square and rule, and after all be a damned blockhead!’ the
victim was probably drawing all the electric tension which had been
accumulating in the poet’s nerves through a long series of irritations
and repressions. But such things did him no good in Edinburgh society.
It was not that his manners were worse than gentlemen’s. In some
respects they were probably better. ‘Swearing,’ Henry Cockburn dryly
records, ‘was thought the right, and the mark, of a gentleman. And,
tried by this test, nobody, who had not seen them, could now be made
to believe how many gentlemen there were.’ Boswell’s long-suffering
wife, Margaret Montgomerie, took her husband to task for his loud and
abusive manner of asserting himself in argument, and Boswell admitted
to his journal that she was right. Benjamin Franklin remarked that
Edinburgh was the only place he knew where violent disputatiousness was
not confined to lawyers and university men. But when a mere peasant
exhibited, in however mild a form, the traits of the gentry, he was
forgetting his place, and should be put back in it.
Moreover, Burns quickly realized that these gentry scorned the national
tradition which was his life-blood. If they did not all, like Dr. John
Moore, urge him henceforth to write in standard English, they at least
made it plain that a Scots poet could not aspire to literary equality
with Dr. Beattie and Dr. Blair. Robert Fergusson was a regrettable
scamp whom Edinburgh preferred to forget; Burns erected, at his own
expense, a monument to Fergusson, and insisted, in speech and writing,
on praising the dead poet and heaping scorn on the gentry who had let
him starve. The place where Burns, after the first few weeks, really
enjoyed himself in Edinburgh and where he made most of his intimate
and lasting friendships, was among the Crochallan Fencibles. This
was one of the numerous clubs in which lawyers and merchants carried
on the old convivial traditions of their city. Edinburgh clubs were
ancient institutions which arrayed bibulous functions in ceremonials
ranging from the harmless High Jinks described by Scott in _Guy
Mannering_ to almost psychopathic debauchery in such an organization
as the Wig Club. They were, in fact, along with the Freemasons, the
ancestors both of the American fraternal orders and of the Rotary and
Kiwanis Clubs. In the more elaborately organized groups each officer,
and sometimes every member, had a special title. Thus each member in
Allan Ramsay’s Easy Club took the name of an old Scottish writer; in
the Cape Club, to which Robert Fergusson belonged, each member was a
Knight Companion of the Cape, with tides like Sir Cape, Sir Brimstone,
Sir Precenter (Fergusson himself), Sir Nun and Abbess, and Sir Pope.
The Fencibles went in for military designations. William Smellie, the
gruff, slovenly, and erudite printer who was handling the Edinburgh
edition of the _Poems_, as Adjutant of the corps introduced the poet.
Burns’s publisher, Creech, proved a social disappointment as well as
a financial disaster; his printer was a man after his own heart, an
‘old Veteran in Genius, Wit and Bawdry’. Smellie, like Burns, concealed
an inward diffidence and sensitivity beneath an aggressive manner;
like Burns, too, he was self-educated. The poet was not far wrong in
describing him as ‘a man positively of the first abilities and greatest
strength of mind, as well as one of the best hearts and keenest wits
that I have met with.’ He had displayed his intellectual power in his
_Philosophy of Natural History_, long regarded as a standard work, and
in writing large sections of the original _Encyclopædia Britannica_;
his wit he reserved for conversation, where, like Burns’s, it allowed
no considerations of reverence or prudery to stand in its way. Despite
his rough exterior, he was able to captivate an intelligent woman
of the world like Maria Riddell, as well as the ebullient poet. But
the records of this friendship were too much for Smellie’s squeamish
executors; his biographer piously relates that ‘many letters of Burns
to Mr. Smellie which remained, being totally unfit for publication,
and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable
people still in life, have been burnt.’
The records of another friendship which had its start among the
Edinburgh bookmen fared better. Peter Hill, five years the poet’s
senior, was in 1787 a clerk in Creech’s shop, but was soon to set up
in business for himself and prove a kindly and indulgent master to
an apprentice named Archibald Constable. Hill’s was one of the few
friendships Burns made in Edinburgh which suffered no abatement with
time. From the summer of 1787, when Hill was handling some of the
innumerable details of business relating to the Edinburgh _Poems_,
until the beginning of 1796, when Burns sent his ‘annual’ gift of a
kippered salmon from the Nith, their association was unclouded. Hill
supplied the poet with books, sent presents to his family, and took
care of miscellaneous business errands in the city. Burns secured
for Hill the book-orders, first of the Monkland Friendly Society and
later of the Dumfries Public Library, and interspersed his business
communications with hearty blasts of execration, broad humour, and
messages to all their common friends. Though the phraseology of the
letters often seems stilted, behind its stiffness glows a genuine
affection and esteem.
But the backbone of the Fencibles was the lawyers. Their Colonel,
William Dunbar, was a jolly little bachelor some years older than the
poet; their Major and Muster-Master General was Charles Hay, friend of
Boswell in the days when the latter was striving for distinction at the
Scottish bar, whose port-inflamed countenance blinks above his judicial
robes as Lord Newton in Raeburn’s superb portrait in the Scottish
National Gallery. More notable for ‘law, paunch, whist, claret, and
worth’ than for literary interests, Hay’s one poetic suggestion to
Burns had humiliating results. He was among those who urged the poet to
compose the unfortunate elegy ‘On the Death of Lord President Dundas’,
the complete ignoring of which by Dundas’s son inflicted on Burns’s
pride a wound which never healed.
Among the lawyer Fencibles the most congenial to Burns was Alexander
Cunningham, a distant and impoverished relative of Lord Glencairn.
Though Burns described him to his face as dissipated but not
debauched--a subtle distinction of which the exact import is probably
forever lost--Cunningham was diffident and retiring. Perhaps for this
reason, perhaps also because of his kinship to Glencairn, Burns never
sent him on such ticklish errands as he entrusted to Bob Ainslie, but
their literary and intellectual fellowship was sincere. Unlike Hay and
Ainslie, Cunningham had real fondness for the higher types of poetry,
though to offset this he had the anglicized Scotsman’s inability to
see anything but the ludicrous and the low in folk literature. Burns
felt that in offering ‘My Love is like a red red rose’ to Cunningham
he had to apologize for its simplicity; Popean imitations would have
been more in his line. The young lawyer, in short, belonged to the
generation which was trying to live down the national characteristics
that meant most to Burns. In Edinburgh the legal profession was the
last stronghold of the rich old gusto of Scottish life, the last group
of men unashamed of being ‘characters’. But even there such traits
belonged mainly to the generation passing or past which included
men like Braxfield, Monboddo, and Kames, or to the already mature
generation of Charles Hay and Henry Erskine. Cunningham belonged more
nearly to the generation of Henry Cockburn, without Cockburn’s relish
for the memories of traits which he did not share.
Within the limits imposed by his diffidence and his tastes, Cunningham
had no reason to complain of lack of sympathy or confidence from Burns.
When his first sweetheart jilted him with humiliating publicity,
Cunningham told his sorrow to Burns, who had previously supplied him
with a poor song in furtherance of his suit, and who now condoled in
terms which bore hard on the young lady. The poet’s letters ranged
from gay impromptu verses to the confession that as a result of the
fiasco of the elegy, ‘I never see the name, Dundas, in the column of a
newspaper, but my heart seems straitened for room in my bosom; & if I
am obliged to read aloud a paragraph relating to one of them, I feel
my forehead flush, & my nether lip quivers.’ On his part, Cunningham
obtained for Burns the last national honour which Edinburgh conferred
in his lifetime--election to membership in the socially exclusive Royal
Company of Archers. And at the end Cunningham received one of the
poet’s desperate appeals for help--not for money, but for intercession
with the Commissioners of Excise not to put him on half-pay during
his illness. Cunningham, moreover, shared with John Syme the credit
for setting on foot the subscription for Jean and the children after
Burns’s death, though his diffidence made him a poor collector of
funds. Through diffidence, also, he permitted George Thomson to prepare
for the newspapers the obituary he should have written himself, and by
this neglect did injury to his friend’s memory.
But the names of three other friends are associated with much more
damage to Burns’s reputation during his life and after his death. Only
one of the three was a Fencible--Robert Cleghorn, a jolly gentleman
farmer from Corstorphine. Cleghorn had what Cunningham lacked, a
strong relish for vernacular literature, publishable or unpublishable.
Thus he became the recipient of many choice bits of verse, sometimes
traditional and sometimes original, for his own and his friends’
edification. The correspondence harmed Burns’s reputation not through
its publication but through its long suppression. That remarkable
moralist, Lord Byron, read the Cleghorn letters in manuscript and
set down in his journal a highly-coloured summary of them as ‘full
of oaths and obscene songs’ which stimulated the imaginations of
several generations of readers. Now that the surviving letters can
be read in full, they produce no such revulsion as do some of the
things Burns wrote about Jean Armour and Maria Riddell. For readers
who do not relish broad humour they may be distasteful, but beneath
their coarseness is the record of a genuine friendship with an honest,
hearty, and generous man. One suspects that had Cunningham, for
instance, visited Burns at Ellisland or Dumfries, he would have felt
the same disillusionment at sight of the poet’s narrow and primitive
domestic life which the pettier Robert Ainslie recorded. Cleghorn made
such a visit in 1795, when Burns’s health and spirits were already
declining, and left behind him a warm glow of renewed and strengthened
friendship.
It is regrettable that Cleghorn’s name should be, for most readers of
Burns, associated with the poet’s collection of ‘cloaciniad’ verse. In
fact, Cleghorn received no more of such work than did a dozen other
friends, but John Allen, his stepson and heir, had ideas about the
treatment of a great poet’s manuscripts which differed from those of
William Smellie’s executors. Allen did not feel free, by mutilating
some of his most characteristic letters, to ‘protect the memory’ of
a poet who had never tried to disguise any side of his own nature.
And Cleghorn’s tastes were as catholic as David Herd’s, or as Burns’s
own. He measured the merit of a song by its singing quality, and not
by its suitability for use in a young ladies’ seminary. Burns sent
him the charming ‘O wat ye wha that lo’es me’ with the certainty
that it would please him as much as the broadest ribaldry. The male
who in male company does not occasionally relish crude humour is a
scarce creature in any age or nation; was perhaps unusually scarce in
eighteenth-century Scotland. The songs which went to Cleghorn went also
to Graham of Fintry and Provost Maxwell, to Collector Mitchell and John
M’Murdo and John Syme--in other words, to some of the best and most
loyal characters in Burns’s circle. Boswell’s journals are crammed with
proof that similar tastes prevailed in still higher ranks of society.
To avoid misunderstanding both Burns and his friends, a brief
digression is necessary regarding the book entitled _The Merry Muses of
Caledonia_. Burns was well aware that his own work, like the folk-songs
he collected, was divided into the publishable and the unpublishable.
But he did not draw the line where his later editors did. To him, ‘The
Jolly Beggars’, ‘A Poet’s Welcome’, and ‘Holy Willie’ were no fitter
for general circulation than were ‘When Princes and Prelates’ and
‘The Court of Equity’. They were _jeux d’esprit_ intended for private
circulation among a few intimates. His riotous imagination respected
no boundaries when it began to play; what distinguishes most of his
bawdry from the common sort is its wit. And this wit as frequently
saw how an improper folk-song could be made more brilliantly improper
as it saw how a halting one could be made lyric. Much of his folk
collection, together with ‘a very few’ of his own composition, was
written into a manuscript volume which he sometimes lent about, with
strict injunctions as to secrecy. According to tradition, that volume
fell after his death into unscrupulous hands and formed the basis of
the earliest of the various collections called _The Merry Muses_. The
tradition is almost certainly wrong. The ultimate source may have been
Burns, but not the immediate one. In all the editions the authentic
Burns verses are too garbled to have been printed from his own copies.
They bear every sign of oral transmission or hasty transcription at
several removes from the original. The real manuscript was probably
destroyed after Burns’s death; certainly it was never printed. It would
have been better for his reputation if it had, for he now stands father
or godfather to a garbled mass of Scottish, English, and Irish filth,
little of which he wrote, and some of which he never even saw.
Neither Robert Ainslie nor William Nicol needed the chance association
of their names with fescennine verse to bring discredit on Burns. Their
own conduct sufficed. Ainslie, like Cunningham, was a young lawyer,
but the two moved in different orbits, and were never brought together
even by their friendship for Burns. They appealed to different facets
of the poet’s nature, Ainslie’s relation to him being that of Smith
and Richmond in the days of the Fornicators’ Court. The son of a good
family in the Border village of Dunse, Ainslie was celebrating his
recent emancipation from parental government by sowing a plentiful crop
of wild oats. Full of the high spirits of twenty-one, he furnished the
same ready chorus of laughter the Mauchline cronies had provided, and
was rapidly qualifying himself to discuss with Burns the pleasing topic
of comparative bastardy. The most enjoyable part of the poet’s Border
tour in May, 1787, was his visit to Dunse; after Ainslie left him he
complained that he never had a mouthful of really hearty laughter on
the trip.
Even the mutilated letters which survive show that Burns freely
confided his past and present peccadillos to Ainslie; the sequel proves
the confidence to have been ill bestowed. At the end of the Border
tour, for instance, Burns found awaiting him in Dumfries post-office
a letter from Meg Cameron, an Edinburgh servant girl who was to
bear a child which she claimed was his. Ainslie was commissioned to
‘send for the wench and give her ten or twelve shillings’ against
the poet’s return to the city. In reply, Ainslie broke the news that
he had himself just become the father of an illegitimate son, and
received from his friend a roaring welcome to ‘the venerable Society
of Fathers’. Again in the following year Burns favored Ainslie with a
highly-coloured account of his final reconciliation with Jean Armour,
and early in 1789 instructed his young friend to locate Jenny Clow so
that Burns, on his arrival in Edinburgh, could settle the suit Jenny
had brought against him. More creditable matters also occupied the
correspondence. Some of Burns’s earliest doubts about Ellisland, some
of his deepest gloom about his own and his family’s future, were told
to Ainslie. But the friendship died before Burns did, and through
Ainslie’s fault.
On Friday, October 15, 1790, Ainslie came to Ellisland for the
week-end. On Monday he reported the visit to Agnes M’Lehose, with whom
he was by this time on confidential, and even flirtatious, terms. The
warmth of Burns’s welcome was gratifying, but the house, he noted,
was ‘ill contrived--and pretty Dirty, and _Hugry Mugry_’, and its
other inmates pleased him little. Jean was ‘Vulgar & Common-place in a
considerable degree--and pretty round & fat’, but ‘a kind Body in her
Own way, and the husband Tolerably Attentive to her’. Also present were
Burns’s sister and sister-in-law--‘common looking girls’--and ‘3 Male
and female cousins’ who had been helping with the harvest.
Burns rejoiced that his friend had arrived ‘upon his _Kirn_ night, when
he Expected some of his friends to help make merry’, but sight of the
guests deepened Ainslie’s depression, for they were ‘a Vulgar looking
Tavern keeper from Dumfries; and his Wife more Vulgar--Mr. Miller of
Dalswinton’s Gardener and his Wife--and said Wife’s sister--and a
little fellow from Dumfries, who had been a Clerk’. Burns and the rest
had a good time, ‘Dancing, and Kissing the Lasses at the End of every
dance’, while Ainslie shuddered to the depths of his paltry little
soul. Burns the peasant was enjoying himself in the world of his birth,
and the young snob from Edinburgh couldn’t understand him at all:
‘... Our Friend himself is as ingenious as ever, and Seems very happy
with the Situation I have described--His Mind however now appears to
me to be a great Mixture of the poet and the Excise Man--One day he
sits down and Writes a Beautiful poem--and the Next he Seizes a cargo
of Tobacco from some unfortunate Smuggler--or Roups out some poor
Wretch for Selling liquors without a License. From his conversation he
Seems to be frequently among the Great--but No Attention is paid by
people of any rank to his wife....’
After such a letter--withheld from complete publication until 1938--it
is plain enough why the friendship went into a swift decline. For
another year or two Burns continued to write, gaily or confidentially,
but got small response. Ainslie’s last letter, early in 1794, ‘was so
dry, so distant, so like a card to one of his clients’, that the poet
‘could scarce bear to read it’, and never answered it. The lawyer was
already on his way, via the fashionable _Werther_ melancholy, back to
the orthodox piety which led him, early in the nineteenth century, to
compose a couple of devotional pamphlets. But neither piety nor loyalty
sufficed to make him protect the memory of the friend whose name has
kept his alive. Preserving the reckless letters Burns had written him,
he allowed them to pass into circulation, once at least accompanied
by a formal docket certifying that Burns was the author of a letter
signed with a humorous pen-name. The mutilations which so many of the
manuscripts have suffered were the work of later owners.
Ainslie’s chief injury to Burns’s fame was inflicted after the poet’s
death; William Nicol, Latin master in Edinburgh High School, harmed
him in life. A coarse, egotistical, drunken man of violent temper,
Nicol was also one of the foremost Latin scholars of his day. In his
bawdy violence of language Burns saw wit; his emphatic dislike of his
superiors Burns interpreted as proof of an independent spirit. No great
harm might have come of the friendship had it been confined to drinking
bouts in Edinburgh and to correspondence thereafter. Unfortunately
Burns took Nicol as his travelling companion on the tour of the
Highlands in September, 1787. This tour was Burns’s chance to meet
influential folk in their homes and to show himself at his best. Thanks
to Nicol he came near to showing himself at his worst. Among the people
from whom he had invitations were the Duke and Duchess of Athole.
Their reception of him at Blair Athole was all the touchy poet could
desire. The Duke and Duchess were cordiality itself; among the guests
was Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, whose friendship
and influence could be of the utmost importance to Burns; a still
more influential person, Henry Dundas, dispenser of patronage for all
Scotland, was expected next day on one of his periodical inspections
of his political fences. Everything seemed to be going well for Burns
when Nicol, the ‘most unprincipled savage’, intervened. The boorish
schoolmaster, finding himself neglected in favour of his companion,
decided to move on at once, and insisted on Burns’s going with him.
The poet’s pride made him guilty of outrageous bad manners. In reply
to Nicol’s insistence, Burns should have bidden him go to the devil
his own gait. But that might have been interpreted as subservience to
the Great. Through what can only be described as inverted snobbery,
Burns allowed Nicol to drag him away. The scene was repeated at Castle
Gordon, where the merry Duchess, who had declared in Edinburgh that
Burns swept her off her feet, pleaded in vain against Nicol’s urgings.
Though he afterwards wrote complimentary and apologetic letters, and
cursed the ‘obstinate son of Latin Prose’, Burns could not efface the
impression he had made. He never saw the Atholes or the Gordons again.