Burns away before breakfast from the home of his cousin, James Burness
of Montrose. The Highland tour, though he did not then realize it, was
Burns’s last opportunity to enlist the active friendship of people
whose influence might have changed his life. His failure was largely
Nicol’s fault. Reports of his abrupt and ungracious conduct undoubtedly
came back to Edinburgh and contributed to the comparative neglect he
suffered during his second winter in the city. Edinburgh was too small
a place for misconduct to hide in; every lawyer in the old Parliament
House would have heard that a servant girl had brought suit against the
Ayrshire Bard; the stories from the Highlands, losing nothing in the
telling, would add to the swelling tide of hostile gossip. The talk,
indeed, reached so far, and was believed so implicitly, that not even
death could alter Edinburgh opinion. Cunningham’s efforts to interest
prominent citizens in the subscription for Burns’s widow and children
met repeated snubs and refusals; to this day, despite the monument
on the Calton Hill, the city pays only a half-hearted tribute to his
memory.
Of course all blame for the hostile talk cannot be shifted to Nicol,
or even to Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow. Burns was indiscreet enough to
start plenty of tales without help. But his too long stay unfortunately
predisposed many people to believe the worst not only of his conduct
in the city but afterwards. Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart, for
instance, both accepted at face value the second-hand reports of
Burns’s alleged misdoings in Dumfries, and wrote him off their books.
For years anecdotes showing Burns in an absurd or discreditable light
circulated in Edinburgh. Some may have been true; others were malicious
distortions which point the direction taken by city opinion. Thus
Lockhart told how Hugh Blair had suggested, when a party of gentlemen
were discussing possible changes in the Kilmarnock _Poems_, that
‘tidings of salvation’ might advantageously be emended to ‘tidings of
damnation’. Thereupon the poet, according to Lockhart, embarrassed
the professor by asking permission to acknowledge his improvement in
a footnote. The basis of the story is truth; its details are not.
Blair did suggest the change; Burns did, in conversation with other
people, acknowledge his help. But Blair’s suggestion came in writing,
as a carefully veiled hint amid other criticisms of the poems. The
episode as Lockhart told it is city gossip intended to display Blair
as the urbane professor and patron and Burns as a clumsy rustic. Of
no importance in itself, the story is symptomatic of the attitude of
cultured Edinburgh after the first enthusiasm over Burns had waned.
But no realization of the trouble Nicol was helping to make, no
recognition of the schoolmaster’s real character, affected Burns. He
continued, after he left the city, to correspond with Nicol; when the
obstinate son of Latin Prose got into the row which finally led to his
resignation from the High School, Burns championed him against his
amiable principal, Dr. Alexander Adam. By christening one of his sons
William Nicol, Burns proclaimed his friendship to the world at large,
and during the years at Ellisland performed such services as getting
appraisals of a farm Nicol was buying, and maintaining a broken-down
mare which a horse-coper had passed off on the schoolmaster. The
friendship lasted until February, 1793, when Burns was suffering from
the rage and humiliation which followed the official inquiry into his
revolutionary sympathies. Some report of the matter having reached
Nicol, he undertook to rebuke Burns in a would-be facetious vein.
The poet was in no mood for rebuke or good advice, facetious or not,
and with his heavily satirical reply to Nicol their correspondence
ended--too late.
In any case Edinburgh friendships, good or bad, however much he might
try to maintain them by correspondence, could not supply companionship
when Burns moved to Ellisland. Though on his first visit to Dumfries
he had professed himself enchanted with the company he met, he was
lonely enough when he actually settled there. He made acquaintances, no
doubt ‘men of talent and humour’, among the tradesfolk and professional
men of the town, but people like Dr. James Mundell, Walter Auld the
saddler, Henry Clint of the King’s Arms, William Hyslop of the Globe
Inn, and Thomas Boyd, the contractor who built Ellisland, are names and
little more. Apart from his landlord, Patrick Miller, with whom his
relations were soon strained, the most congenial friend he had during
the three years on the farm was Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, whose
estate of Friars Carse marched with Ellisland.
Riddell was a country gentleman turned amateur antiquarian. He had
embellished his grounds with a ‘Druid Circle’ and a ‘Hermitage’; he
dabbled in numismatics and church architecture. These would scarcely
have interested Burns--though he remained in the hermitage long enough
to inscribe some verses on the window with Glencairn’s diamond-pointed
pencil--but Riddell was also a musician in a small way. Besides
composing a few commonplace airs of his own he professed great
interest in the traditional music of his country. Here Burns shared
his enthusiasm and far excelled his knowledge. The laird, perhaps at
Burns’s suggestion, subscribed for Johnson’s _Museum_ and had his set
bound with blank interleaves for notes on the songs, their authors,
and their history. The number of his annotations gives the measure
of his knowledge. Out of four hundred songs, one hundred and seventy
have notes. Of these, one hundred and fifty-two were written by Burns,
who must have spent many evenings at the task in his friend’s library;
eighteen were by Riddell himself or an amanuensis. Sir Walter Scott
summed up the laird’s prose writings as ‘truly the most extravagant
compositions that ever a poor Man abandoned by providence to the
imaginations of his own heart had the misfortune to devise.’
The company which sometimes came to Carse, including as it did men like
Joseph Farington the painter--who noted that ‘Mr. Burns the Scottish
Poet’ was ‘a middle-sized man, ... black complexioned, and his general
appearance that of a tradesman or mechanick’, had ‘a strong expressive
manner of delivering himself in conversation’, and knew no Latin--and
Francis Grose, the antiquary whose inspiring enthusiasm was the real
source of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, was more important than Riddell himself.
The laird’s real tastes and aptitudes were convivial. A man of powerful
physique and a rather overwhelming robustiousness of manner--William
Smellie spoke of ‘his immense fist and stentorian voice’--he succeeded,
like so many gentlemen of his day, in wrecking his health at an early
age. The notorious ‘Whistle’ contest, in which Riddell and his kinsmen
Sir Robert Laurie and Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch undertook
to drink each other under the table for the possession of a family
heirloom, was probably more typical of the laird’s true aptitudes
than the annotations were. Even at that, though, he was outdone by
Craigdarroch, who won the whistle by drinking ‘upds. of 5 Bottles of
Claret’. Burns, like most of the friends of the contestants, found the
incident vastly amusing; Burns’s biographers have argued the question
of his real presence at Friars Carse with an almost theological
fervour; nevertheless its only interest or value for posterity lies
in the light it sheds on Robert Riddell’s character. According to
biographical tradition, Robert Riddell was the staid member of the
family and his brother Walter the wild one; actually such distinction
between them seems as baseless as the kindred legend that Gilbert Burns
was a better farmer than his brother. But whether Glenriddell led or
followed in the events which for a time estranged the poet from the
whole Riddell family, the circumstances of the breach resemble with
painful clarity many other episodes in Burns’s contacts with the gentry.
The full story of the ‘Rape of the Sabines’ is Maria Riddell’s more
than her brother-in-law’s, but Robert Riddell had a share in the
trouble. During 1792 and 1793, when Walter Riddell and his wife
Maria were occupying the estate of Goldielea or Woodley Park, family
relations were not always harmonious. At a guess, Walter wanted to
borrow from his elder brother the funds to complete payment for Woodley
Park; at a guess, the wives failed to charm each other. Whatever the
causes, by the autumn of 1792 Burns had to assure Maria that he
would listen to no stories about her from Glenriddell--and presumably
also from Glenriddell’s wife. Yet for another year or more the poet
managed to stay on good terms with both families. The year 1793 was,
poetically and flirtatiously, the highest point of Burns’s friendship
with Maria; the same year produced asseverations of friendship as
‘ardent & grateful’ on Burns’s part as Robert Riddell’s was ‘kind and
generous’. In leisure moments the poet was transcribing a collection
of his letters as a companion volume to the collection of unpublished
verse he had given the laird in 1791. On Christmas day he was still
transcribing. On January 12, 1794, his quarrel with Maria had reached
its climax. Somewhere between those two dates had occurred the
mysterious brawl in which Robert Riddell’s part is still a matter of
controversy.
If Robert Riddell was the host, who, by compelling Burns to drink more
than he wished to, reduced the poet to a state in which he insulted
his hostess, the laird’s conduct admits of small excuse; if, as
report has it, the scene occurred at Woodley Park and Robert Riddell
subsequently took up the quarrel, he is even less excusable. Whichever
version one accepts, Riddell was displaying innate snobbishness towards
a man he considered, after all, a social inferior. If he was the
host, realization of his own share in the matter should have made him
charitable; if his brother was the host, Glenriddell was indulging in
violent and uncalled-for partisanship. He held, it would seem, the same
theory of a gentleman’s privileges as was enunciated a few years later
by Sir John Graham Dalyell: ‘I am a gentleman, and I will be treated
as such; and if any person presumes to pervert my meaning in any way
whatever, if his rank is not equal to mine I will kick him; and if it
is equal I will shoot him.’ Burns, as a plebeian, was kicked. There is
a little satisfaction in knowing that the poet held to his resolution
not to apologize to his host. The ‘Remorseful Apology’ supposed to
have been addressed to a Riddell was really sent, early in 1796, to a
Mr. S. Mackenzie. Four months after the quarrel Glenriddell was dead,
still unreconciled to the poet who had done more for him than he could
ever have done for the poet. A loud blustering squire, a hollow and
unsubstantial mind; that was Robert Riddell.
For the last five years of his life Burns’s social world centred in
Dumfries. About it cluster dark stories and darker hints, in the
effort to refute which the poet’s defenders have sometimes been led
to dangerous extremities of special pleading. The truth is that Burns
in Dumfries was neither better nor worse than Burns in Tarbolton and
Mauchline. Such a report as James Gray’s of finding Burns reading
poetry with his children and hearing the older boys recite their
lessons does not refute the tales of boisterous revelry in taverns;
both are true. The sole difference is that Burns in Tarbolton was an
unimportant young man amid a group of other youths; in Edinburgh he was
partly lost in the crowds; in Dumfries he was a prominent figure whose
every action was noted. He did not degenerate in Dumfries, but neither
did he become a chocolate seraph.
Fortunately it is no longer necessary to rely on conjecture and
second-hand reports in studying Burns’s last years. The letters which
passed between two of his most intimate friends, John Syme of Dumfries
and Alexander Cunningham of Edinburgh, are now available to replace
guess-work with facts. Of all the friends of Burns’s last years, Syme
is now the one who emerges most clearly, and with most credit to
himself. A man of good education, a college friend of Dr. James Currie,
the poet’s first biographer, Syme regarded Dumfries as a place of exile
in which Burns’s society was almost the only redeeming feature. Having
lost his small paternal estate of Barncailzie near Kirkcudbright,
he had managed to recoup his fortunes by getting appointed to the
sinecure post of Collector of Stamps at Dumfries. He first met Burns
in 1788, but not until two years later did they become intimate. Syme
was a man of sentiment in the best tradition of Henry Mackenzie and
_The Sorrows of Werther_. He went into raptures over thunderstorms
and desolate scenery; he read Zimmermann’s _Treatise on Solitude_; he
thought Clarinda’s the finest love-letters ever written. Rhapsodic and
absent-minded, he was the sort who could set off on a long-planned
hunting-trip and find on arriving at his destination that he had
forgotten his dogs. Maria Riddell paid warm tribute to his good head
and excellent heart, but added that in matters of business he wanted
method: ‘He is always in a labyrinth of papers and accounts, and,
somewhat like the cuttlefish, he obscures himself altogether in a mist
of his own creating.’
Burns admired Syme’s education and literary taste; Syme thought the
poet ‘a noble fellow’, admired his wit and brilliant conversation, but
could not admire his wife. ‘Methinks he has exhibited his poetical
genius when he celebrated her’, he said to Cunningham after his first
sight of Jean. Before long Burns was submitting his new poems to Syme
and expressing implicit confidence in his judgement, though Syme avowed
that he scarcely dared to touch a line of them. Sometimes the two would
meet in a boisterous crowd at a tavern; again they would spend a quiet
evening over a single bottle of wine in the little croft of Ryedale
which Syme regarded as his refuge ‘from the frivolous and dissipated
society’ of Dumfries. Without Burns, said Syme, his life in the town
would be ‘a dreary blank’. Syme had set himself up as a clearing-house
for humorous and satirical verses written or collected by his friends,
and Burns quickly became the chief contributor to the hoard. Some of
the verses compelled caution in sharing them. Of the epigram on the
Loyal Natives Club, for instance, Syme told Cunningham that, though he
and Burns were ‘far from differing from them on sentiments of loyalty,
we differ on _sentiment_, abstractly considered. They scarcely know
the meaning of the word Sentiment, & their Society consists in roaring
& drinking.’ ‘Don’t,’ he added after quoting the epigram, ‘let any
Dumfries person see this, for one of the Savages, if he heard it,
might cut Robin’s pipe.’
Syme’s letters abundantly illustrate what he meant by ‘frivolous and
dissipated society’. When the Caledonian Hunt met at Dumfries in
November, 1794, ‘Baker, one of the knowing english Squires on the Turf,
made an elegant appearance by insulting in the grossest manner Squire
Walter Riddel of this place, who pursued him to Durham and made him
ask pardon, which is published in our papers of last week.’ On the
same occasion the Honourable Ramsay Maule of Panmure showed that for
once at least Burns was justified in the tone of a satirical epigram,
for Panmure and some drunken companions smeared a helpless underling’s
hair with mustard and stuck it full of toothpick quills, ‘by way of
hedgehogging him’. That Burns gnashed his teeth and passed by on the
other side when he encountered such members of the organization to
which he had dedicated his Edinburgh _Poems_, is no ground for wonder.
He had larded the Caledonian Hunt with flattery, and they were behaving
like cads and bullies.
But though Burns shrank from the Caledonian Hunt he did not always
avoid similar company. There were meetings at which he and Syme drank
bumpers out with wild Irishmen--such meetings as led Thomas Telford the
engineer jovially to warn Burns that if he went on ‘in his old way,
not even a _she Devil_ will be able to meet with a Milt in him.’ There
was a drunken brawl with one Captain Dods, who took hot exception to
the poet’s toast, ‘May our success in the present war be equal to the
justice of our cause.’ That Burns escaped a duel only because he was
not the Captain’s social equal did not lessen his humiliation. Most
biographers have held that such a toast in the presence of gentlemen
holding the King’s commission was a huge breach of the proprieties,
and so it was--if Burns was not goaded into giving it. Nothing in the
record as it stands forbids belief that Dods, or some other officer
who knew that Burns was suspected of sympathy with the French, may
have called for a round of loyal toasts with the deliberate intention
of embarrassing the poet. In that case, nothing could have been neater
than Burns’s evasion, and since nothing came of the episode it is to
be presumed that Samuel Clarke succeeded in making the sobered Dods
realize what his objection to the sentiment implied.
But there were other similar episodes which cannot be so favourably
explained, and which multiply proof that Burns had never acquired
finesse, whether in toasting, flattering, or sinning. Whatever he did
was done so forthrightly that it attracted attention. And the moment he
attracted attention his companions recollected that after all he was a
peasant received on sufferance into gentle company. The outcome might
be expulsion from the house for conduct which a gentleman born need
not even have apologized for, it might be a verbal attack like Captain
Dods’s, or it might be merely a tacit resolve to drop him forthwith.
The Edinburgh experience repeated itself in Dumfries. Burns’s
ill-repute in certain quarters during his life and after his death was
not owing to his being a sinner above the other Caledonians, but simply
to his lack of the social standing which enabled Kames and Braxfield
and Boswell to misbehave without penalty, and which would have tempered
the sting of his satirical outbursts.
Occasional public drunken squabbles are not the only evidence that
during these last years Burns’s nerves were often exacerbated. The
loyal Syme once undertook to rebuke him for some of his wild doings
and sayings. His language was too strong--telling the story afterwards
he admitted, ‘I may have spoken daggers, but I meant none.’ The poet,
his face black with anger, fumbled with his sword-cane. Syme, half
laughing, half serious, exclaimed, ‘What! and in my own house, too!’
The conscience-stricken Burns flung away the cane, burst into tears,
and positively grovelled in contrition on the flagstone floor. It is
not a pleasant scene, and though the vividness with which it stayed in
Syme’s memory is indication enough that it was exceptional, it cannot
be ignored. No man, drunk or sober, whose nerves were normal could have
behaved so.
Fortunately the vividness of Syme’s memory is not the only proof that
such conduct was exceptional. Others besides Syme who were nearest to
Burns in his last years concur in their loyalty and affection. At the
end of 1790 Alexander Findlater reported to his official superior,
Supervisor Corbet, that Burns was ‘an active, faithful & zealous
officer’, gave ‘the most unremitting attention to the duties of his
office (which, by the bye is more than I at first looked for from
so eccentric a Genius)’, and might ‘be considered a credit to the
profession’. And the judgment which Findlater thus expressed at the
beginning of the poet’s Excise career he reaffirmed after his death.
Others testified to their regard in deeds as well as words. Though
Burns continued to display his life-long preference for the company
of extravagant and _outré_ sorts of people the best men in the Excise
were the ones who esteemed him most. John Lewars, for example, brother
of the Jessie of the songs, was a man of some education, and above
the level of the common riding-officer. His father had been Collector
at Dumfries, and thus a man of standing in the community. Burns
called Lewars ‘a young fellow of uncommon merit--indeed, by far the
cleverest fellow I have met with in this part of the world’, and Lewars
reciprocated the poet’s affection by service to him and his family
during his illness and after his death. And that Burns’s long absence
from duty did not bear more heavily on him was due to the kindness
of Adam Stobbie, a young expectant who throughout the spring of 1796
performed Burns’s rounds without pay, that the poet might continue to
draw his full salary.
Fortunately, too, Syme records bright passages as well as dark in the
last years. There were evenings at Ryedale when they consumed more
cups of tea than bottles of wine, and when ‘Robin’s confounding wit’
played as sharply as it ever did over a punchbowl. In 1793 and 1794
there were brief excursions with Burns into Kirkcudbright on which
the mercurial poet displayed every facet of his nature, bursting into
furious rage over a spoiled pair of boots, fulminating brilliantly
satirical epigrams against the Earl of Galloway, announcing that
he would dine nowhere where he could not ‘eat like a Turk, drink
like a fish and swear like the Devil’, and anon proving a decorous
and fascinating houseguest at St. Mary’s Isle, seat of the Earl of
Selkirk, whose son Lord Daer had given Burns his first glimpse of
the peerage. Burns still shrank from the ordeal of encountering such
exalted folk--‘I am indeed ill at ease whenever I approach your
Honorables & Right Honorables’--though now for a different reason. In
1786 the consciousness of his own rusticity had been uppermost; in
1794 he did not wish to be laid open either to a fresh snub or renewed
condescension. But his last recorded intercourse with the peerage was
as pleasant--and as dangerous--as his first. The Earl of Selkirk was
one of the few Scottish peers who were Whigs at a time when all power
belonged to the Tories; thus meeting Burns on congenial grounds he
helped to draw him into the last of his ill-advised meddlings with
politics by interesting him in the parliamentary campaign of Patrick
Heron of Heron. So to the last the peerage influenced Burns against
his own best interests. Nevertheless this visit to St. Mary’s Isle is
refutation enough of the charge that in his last years Burns had sunk
so low that gentlefolk shunned him. The man who so charmed the Earl’s
young daughter, Lady Mary Douglas, that she lent him a volume of music
and entered into correspondence about his task of fitting Scottish airs
with words, can scarcely have been the social outcast some biographers
have portrayed. In fact, he strikingly resembles the man who in 1787
swept the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and won the esteem of Lady
Harriet Don and the Dowager Countess of Glencairn.
Despite their intimacy, it would be false to claim that Syme shared all
Burns’s interests. No one man could do that. The very topic on which
Burns and Lady Mary found common ground was outside Syme’s range. He
never could understand what Burns saw in the crude and half-literate
James Johnson, because he never understood the bond of fellowship
established by mutual devotion to Scottish folk-song. Nevertheless,
Syme was probably the closest to Burns of all his Dumfries friends, and
knew--as certain impassioned defenders like Anna Dorothea Benson could
not--the worst as well as the best in his later conduct. The man who
noted that ‘Robin’s temper is not cold and frugal’, and who did not
hesitate to record the sword-cane story and certain other episodes,
cannot be charged with allowing affection to obscure the full truth
about his friend. Hence Syme’s deeds and words at the time of Burns’s
death give as reliable a verdict on the poet’s last years as can now be
reached.