anxiety. As long as he could he hoped for recovery, but when the poet
returned from the Brow Well his ‘cadaverous aspect and shaken frame’
told the truth which the doctors confirmed. On July 17 Syme wrote to
warn Cunningham and to urge him to press their friend’s petition to the
Commissioners of Excise that they continue his full salary. Two days
later, when Syme called at the little house in Mill Street, he saw the
hand of Death visibly fixed on Burns:
‘I cannot dwell on the scene. It overpowers me--yet gracious God were
it thy will to recover him! He had life enough to acknowledge me, and
Mrs. Burns said he had been calling on you and me continually. He
made a wonderful exertion when I took him by the hand. With a strong
voice he said, “I am much better today--I shall soon be well again,
for I command my spirits & my mind. But yesterday I resigned myself to
death.” Alas it will not do.’
Syme was already consulting with Patrick Miller, John M’Murdo, Dr.
Maxwell, and other Dumfries friends to set measures afoot for the
welfare of Jean and the children; when he wrote again on the 21st,
shaken by the ‘variety of distressful emotions’ stirred by Burns’s
death, he gave further details of their plans, and urged Cunningham to
launch a similar plan in Edinburgh and to see that a proper obituary
was prepared. Here Cunningham blundered. He entrusted the obituary to
George Thomson, and the latter’s remark that Burns’s ‘extraordinary
endowments were accompanied with frailties which rendered them useless
to himself and his family’ roused the Dumfries friends to indignation.
‘We were much hurt at this,’ said Syme, ‘& reckoned it indelicate, if
not unfeelingly superfluous on that occasion.’
These feelings were intensified by the appearance in the London
_Chronicle_ of a longer article, also by Thomson, which included
assertions that Burns’s ‘talents were often obscured and finally
impaired by excess,’ that ‘his conduct and his fate afford[ed] but too
melancholy proofs’ of his possessing the failings as well as the powers
of genius, and that, ‘like his predecessor Fergus[s]on, though he died
at an early age, his mind was previously exhausted.’ Thomson had never
been in Dumfries, and had never met Burns. The friends in Dumfries who
read his article did not concur. Syme’s comment was brief and pointed.
These statements were ‘d----d illiberal lies’. On that comment, by
the man who knew him best in his last years, the case for the defence
of Burns against the stories of his deterioration in Dumfries may be
allowed to rest.
IV
WOMEN
Burns was twenty-six before he ever entered the home of a woman
sufficiently well-to-do to have carpets on her floors. Though the last
ten years of his life included many friendships with ladies, his basic
ideas of the other sex were the fruit of the peasant environment he
was reared in. His sentiment and chivalry were literary by-products;
underneath them was always the crude realism of the Ayrshire
countryfolk. In moments of stress it was only too apt to come to the
surface.
The only subtlety the peasant women of Burns’s youth could claim was
that native to every daughter of Eve. Schooling was too expensive to
waste on girls. The majority, like Agnes Broun, could not write their
own names; many could not even spell out the Scriptures or the Psalms
of David in metre. Their fathers, their husbands, or the minister
could read the Bible to them, and thus they could obtain the light of
salvation at second hand. But this is not to say that they knew no
literature. In fact it was only among an illiterate population that the
songs and ballads of popular tradition were living realities. James
Hogg’s mother spoke for her whole class when she told Sir Walter Scott
that he had killed her ballads by writing them down. Learning to read
destroyed both the sense of reality in the traditional literature and
the retentiveness of memory which made its transmission possible. Had
Betty Davidson, Agnes Broun, and Jean Armour been literate women they
would not have furnished Burns with the mass of traditional literature
he owed to them.
A girl’s real education in rural Scotland was obtained in the kitchen,
the dairy, and the fields. Almost as soon as they could walk boys and
girls alike helped with the sheep and cattle and in all the work of
seedtime and harvest. As they grew older the girls were trained more
and more for the indoor duties of which cooking was the smallest part.
Most of the clothing was made at home, from the carding and spinning
of the wool and flax to the sewing of the finished webs into garments.
Itinerant tailors made the Sunday clothes of the men; all the rest was
the work of the women of the household. Add to these activities the
manifold duties of kitchen and dairy and poultry yard and no peasant
woman could have reason to complain of lack of occupation. At harvest
time men and women alike turned out into the fields, the men to mow
with scythe and sickle, the women and boys to bind and stack the
sheaves and to glean after the reapers.
It was from these barefooted illiterate lasses that Burns got his first
experiences in love and his whole simple theory of the relations of the
sexes. Woman as the peasant knows her, sharing his daily toil, is not
a superior being set apart for adoration. There is no mystery about
her except the endless mystery of sex. There may be companionship and
a more intimate sharing of the man’s interests than women of higher
rank attain. But the peasant woman cannot expect and does not get the
graces of deference. Burns’s attitude towards the girls of his class
differed in one respect only from that of any other possessive young
male. He was a poet, and from the very beginning poetry and sex were
inextricably mingled. When as a fifteen-year-old boy he helped Nellie
Kilpatrick to bind sheaves in the harvest field, and experienced the
primitive coquetry which sought his help in extracting nettle and
thistle stings from her fingers, his first impulses were those of any
adolescent just becoming conscious of desire. But the second impulse
was different. Unable to possess Nellie, he made a song about her.
As we have seen, courtship among the peasantry was no private matter.
Not only did everyone know who was courting whom, but the aid of
interested friends was habitually enlisted in arranging trysts.
While still in his teens Burns displayed a command of the written
word--insufferably turgid though the few surviving specimens of his
early love-letters seem to us--which made him the chosen secretary
for his less fluent cronies. He himself fell into love and out again
with ease and frequency. But his early sweethearts are, like Nellie
Kilpatrick, names and nothing more. Burns’s statement that his
relations with women were entirely innocent until after he met Richard
Brown in 1781 is countered by Brown’s charge that he was already fully
initiated. As Henley says, it is one man’s word against another’s;
since Burns was not in the habit of lying about his own conduct we may
believe him. Where, when, or with whom his initiation took place is
both uncertain and unimportant. His own assertion that he ‘commenced
a fornicator’ with Betty Paton is subject to the discount always to
be charged against poetical versions of prose facts. The certainty
is that the years following his return from Irvine were loaded with
emotional tension by three women--Elizabeth Paton, Mary Campbell, and
Jean Armour. Of the three the one who has received the most attention
probably deserves the least.
No glamour of romance shields Betty Paton. A servant of his mother’s at
Lochlie and Mossgiel, she succumbed willingly enough to the advances
of the young farmer whom his father’s death had just released from
tutelage, and in due course bore him a daughter in the spring of
1785. According to Gilbert Burns, Robert wanted to marry her, but was
dissuaded by his family, who feared that her coarseness would soon
disgust him. Perhaps so, but the only contemporary letter does not
include matrimonial desire among the feelings it hints at. After the
first embarrassment wore off and he and Betty had duly stood thrice
before the congregation of Mauchline Kirk to be admonished for their
sin, Burns brazened it out to the scandal of his stricter neighbours,
and Betty accepted it resignedly, knowing that such accidents would
happen and that they need not necessarily impair her future career.
Part of her resignation, however, may have been conviction that Robert
Burns had insufficient prospects to make marriage worth fighting for.
In the fall of 1786, when the Kilmarnock _Poems_ had supplied her
erstwhile lover with a little ready cash, Betty promptly demanded
maintenance for herself and her child. In settling the claim Burns
apparently had to pay over rather more than half his profits, besides
legally binding himself for the complete support and education of his
daughter. When on December 1, 1786, she signed with her mark the legal
discharge of her claim, Betty Paton disappeared from Burns’s life.
She was a merry lass; her lover had paid for his fun; the account
was closed--except for the black-eyed little girl being reared by a
long-suffering grandmother at Mossgiel.
Jean Armour’s case was different, though it commenced, like Betty’s,
in purely physical attraction. To begin with, the status of the girls
was different, even though both were red-knuckled, barefooted country
lasses. Betty was merely a farm servant whose family ties, whatever
they were, were already broken. Jean was the eighteen-year-old daughter
of James Armour, a well-to-do master-mason and contractor in Mauchline.
She was educated to the extent of being able to read the Bible and
write her own name. The story of her first meeting with Burns is
probably legend, yet in spirit the anecdote is at least partly true.
Burns at a village dance, embarrassed by a too-faithful collie which
followed him about the floor, remarked as he expelled the animal
that he wished he could find a lass to love him as well as his dog
did. Whether or not Jean actually asked him a few days later, when he
found her bleaching linen on the green, if he had yet found such a
lass, the fact was that he had. From that moment until his death Jean
lavished upon him a docile and much-enduring devotion which leaves
nothing derogatory in the comparison. She was playing with fire and
must have known it. The scandal of Betty Paton was still fresh; Burns
was a notorious man, glorying in the reputation of village Lothario
and writing verses to warn the Mauchline belles how devastating he
was. Experience had convinced him that all women are sisters under the
skin--a dangerous half-truth which made trouble for him when he met
women of another social level. They may all be sisters under the skin,
but not on it or outside it. The fascination exerted so successfully
over girls of his own class was in fact disastrous training for
subsequent encounters with ladies. A lady may yield to a lover like any
peasant lass, but she expects some finesse in his approach. But in the
summer and autumn of 1785 Burns seemed as likely to enter Edinburgh
drawing-rooms as to enter Parliament. He was merely an unsuccessful
tenant-farmer with a dangerous talent for writing satirical verse and a
dangerous light in his eye when an attractive young woman was in sight.
Between the tradition of his first meeting with Jean in 1785 and the
beginning of surviving references to the affair in February, 1786, its
history is a blank. On the surface Jean’s experience merely repeated
Betty Paton’s. She surrendered to Burns and in due course endured the
consequences. Yet on Burns’s side the cases were not alike. However
brazenly he may have begun his courtship he soon found that Jean roused
deeper emotions than Betty ever had. His first extant reference to the
affair, apart from verses in praise of Jean’s charms, was on February
17th, 1786, when he told John Richmond--who after a similar scrape
had fled to Edinburgh--that he had important news ‘not of the most
agreable’ with respect to himself. In other words, Jean had told him
she was pregnant. Entirely on his own initiative Burns undertook to do
the right thing he had successfully avoided, or been dissuaded from,
doing for Betty Paton. Sometime in March he gave Jean, if not marriage
lines, at least some written acknowledgement that she was or would be
his wife. That he acted in a certain glow of self-righteousness is
a fair deduction from the violence of his subsequent reaction. Rab
Mossgiel, the village Lothario, had behaved like a man of honour and
expected due recognition of his conduct.
The recognition he got was humiliating in the extreme. The details can
be reconstructed only by inference from the result. Apparently Jean’s
parents, suspecting her condition, began to question her. She produced
Burns’s written pledge. A domestic storm burst, not so much because
Jean was to bear Burns’s child as because he expected Jean to bear
his name. To James Armour an illegitimate grandchild was preferable to
such a son-in-law as Robert Burns. Jean meekly surrendered her lines to
her father--throughout her life she was usually passive in the hands
of male authority--and Armour carried the document to Burns’s patron
and friend, Robert Aiken, whom he persuaded to cut out the names. Not
the least extraordinary element in the affair is the apparent belief
of a successful lawyer that a contract could be voided merely by
mutilating the written evidence. Armour’s desire publicly to humiliate
Burns was greater than his desire to protect his daughter. He succeeded
admirably. In the same letter in which the poet told Gavin Hamilton
that the document was mutilated he declared he ‘had not a hope or
even a wish to make her mine after her damnable conduct’, yet amid
his execrations he paused to invoke a blessing on his ‘poor once-dear
misguided girl’. The letter was the first of a series of denunciations
and repudiations of Jean much too loud and too shrill to be convincing.
They suggest that Burns had to talk at the top of his voice to maintain
the degree of indifference which he felt self-respect called for.
Perhaps nothing in Burns’s whole life more completely demonstrates the
impossibility of judging him and the society in which he was reared
by the standards of nineteenth-century middle-class respectability.
When James Armour learned that the subscription for the Kilmarnock
_Poems_ was a success he showed that, though unwilling that his
daughter should bear Burns’s name, he was quite willing she should
share Burns’s money. Accordingly he sued out a writ _in meditatione
fugae_ to require Burns to guarantee the support of Jean’s expected
child. The news reached Burns, probably from Jean herself, and he acted
promptly. By formal deed of assignment he conveyed to Gilbert not only
his share in Mossgiel, but also the entire proceeds of his forthcoming
poems in consideration of Gilbert’s undertaking to provide for Betty
Paton’s child. Burns had checkmated James Armour, and so doing had
almost evened the honours for ungenerous conduct. By nineteenth-century
standards his conduct was caddish, but by the same standards Armour
could have done only one of two things--either expel his daughter from
his home, or protect her technical good name by insisting upon marriage
however distasteful the prospective son-in-law was. But even by his own
standards Burns was acting ignobly. The man who had written
‘But devil take the lousy loon
Denies the bairn he got
Or leaves the merry lass he lov’d
To wear a ragged coat,’
and who less than six weeks after the deed of assignment eloquently
reproached John Richmond for neglecting his late mistress and future
wife and her baby daughter, was allowing spite to degrade him below the
standards of the class to which he belonged by birth, and much further
below the standards he had consciously set for himself. This was not
acting according to the example of Harley the Man of Feeling. If the
episode stood by itself it might be easier to condone. Unfortunately
it is merely the first conspicuous incident in a series which includes
his remarks about Jean to Clarinda and Bob Ainslie, his neglect of
Jenny Clow, his attack upon dead Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive, and his
lampoons of Maria Riddell, and which justifies Henley’s phrase that
such things ‘roused the cad’ in Burns. Where women were concerned, it
was always too easy for him to drop the thin cloak of acquired culture
and revert to his peasanthood.
Alongside the Armour quarrel runs the mystery of Mary Campbell. Burns
himself began the mystery by his curiously veiled allusions to the
affair, but the real work of obfuscation was done by biographers who
erected upon exiguous foundations of fact an ornate superstructure of
legend.
The exact date at which Burns composed the ‘Jolly Beggars’ is
uncertain--if it was really written after a slumming frolic with John
Richmond it must have been in 1785--but the closing episode is either
autobiography or prophecy. The Bard, whose sentiments in the closing
chorus are definitely Burns’s own, is depicted with a doxy upon either
arm. After the stormy spring and summer of 1786 Burns confessed
to Robert Aiken that he had plunged into all sorts of riot, Mason
meetings, and dissipation, to distract his mind from the humiliation
of the Armour affair. What form his dissipation took may reasonably
be guessed not only from Burns’s own temperament but from human nature
in general. Yet nothing about his relation with Mary Campbell is
free of doubt. All that can definitely be proved is that there was a
servant-lass of that name to whom Burns apparently addressed certain
lyrics and to whom he certainly gave a pair of Bibles bearing peculiar
inscriptions. It is useless to rehearse the endless controversy between
the romantics to whom Mary Campbell was a Lily Maid of Astolat and the
realists to whom she was just another girl who couldn’t say no. But
a few facts must be underscored. The critical analysis of the legend
made with caustic humour by Henley in 1896 and subsequently elaborated
by Professor Snyder has never been rebutted nor even answered. The
scripture texts Burns wrote on the fly-leaves of that Bible are such
as would have been chosen by a man to whom a frightened girl was
appealing for protection and who was impulsively promising it on his
word of honour as a man and a Mason. That he also sang Mary’s praises
as ‘Highland Lassie’ and in another lyric asked--for poetic effect
at least--if she would go to the Indies with him means little, if
anything. The enthusiasts prefer to forget that during the same summer
Burns said farewell to Eliza Miller in a lyric quite as fervid as any
of those addressed to Mary.
Out of the mass of legend and conjecture the only solid facts which
emerge are that during this spring of 1786 Burns was having some
sort of a love affair with Mary; that she left Ayrshire in May, and
that she died in the early autumn. Burns may have turned to her for
consolation after the breach with Jean; the affairs may have been
simultaneous. Most biographers incline to the sequel theory on the
naïve assumption that love affairs, unlike electric batteries, are
always mounted in series and never in parallel. In view of the social
attitude of the Ayrshire peasantry the question of whether or not Mary
was technically chaste is both metaphysical and irrelevant. Burns’s
attitude toward the other sex was direct; perhaps the strongest
argument for Mary’s chastity would be the complete lack of reference
to her in his contemporary letters, were it not for his subsequent
description of her as ‘as charming a girl as ever blessed a man with
generous love’. Burns ordinarily meant such expressions in the most
literal sense. Despite the evidence in the Bibles that he had tried
again to do the right thing it is hard to believe that in retrospect
Mary would have touched him any more deeply than Jenny Clow or Anne
Park later did had it not been for her untimely death. She certainly
meant little in May and June of 1786. In the same month in which he
gave her the Bible he composed the long and bawdy ‘Court of Equity’;
throughout the summer his letters to his intimates mingle execration,
devotion, and regret for Jean Armour in precisely the same tones he
had used in April. A man who had really found an adequate new love
might be supposed to speak of the old one as Burns had spoken of Peggy
Thomson in 1784. Resentment of the Armours’ conduct might explain
the execration, but hardly the regret and certainly not the devotion.
If Burns really intended to make a new start in Jamaica with Mary
Campbell, it is strange indeed that he never hinted of it to his
friends--unless we accept the tradition, reported at second hand from
John Richmond, that Mary was a light-skirts whose character Richmond
and some other friends exposed to the poet. In that case, he would have
had good reason for silence.
When in October he summed up his situation in a long letter to Robert
Aiken it was still Jean who was the cause of his secret wretchedness
and who was the source of ‘the pang of disappointment, the sting of
pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse’. The sole passage in
the letter which Snyder thought might apply to Mary--‘I have seen
something of the storm of mischief thickening over my folly-devoted
head’--may now be interpreted as referring instead to the disconcerting
reappearance of Betty Paton as a claimant for support. The sole
evidence surviving from 1786, apart from Burns’s lyrics, is his
sister’s story, told many years after his death, that one day in
October he received a letter which he read with a look of agony and
then crushed into his pocket as he silently left the house. Connecting
this story with Burns’s later statement that ‘a malignant fever hurried
my dear girl to her grave before I could even hear of her illness’,
biographers have assumed that the painful letter bore the news of
Mary’s death. But this, even granting perfect reliability to Isabella
Begg’s memory, is pure assumption. Burns’s sole references to her
were written from three to five years after the supposed event. With
one exception they were intended for the mystification rather than the
enlightenment of Robert Riddell and George Thomson. That exception is
the composition of ‘Thou Lingering Star’ and the letter to Mrs. Dunlop
which accompanied it--both of them written in a neurotic state close to
complete nervous breakdown. The Highland Mary we know is the creation
of biographers, and should be suffered to abide in the Never-Never Land
of romance. The truth about the Burns of flesh and blood had better be
sought in his relations with flesh and blood women.
In these relations there were three main degrees. The foremost group
consists of women who profoundly stirred him, and on whom for a time
at least he concentrated his intellect and his affections as well as
his desires. In this group belong Jean Armour, Margaret Chalmers,
Clarinda, and probably Maria Riddell. Next come the women who engaged
his passing fancy, and for whom he felt some tenderness, but who did
not influence him deeply or long. Among these are Betty Paton, Anne
Park, Jean Lorimer, and Jessie Lewars. A woman who appealed to Burns on
either of these bases need not have been his mistress; in fact, only
three of those named ever yielded to him. But below these was a third
group, represented by Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow, who were mistresses
and nothing more--the mere conveniences of the moment. These last
never roused even a momentary spark of poetry in their lover. Judged
purely on the basis of literary by-product, Mary Campbell belongs in
the second group, but not in the first. Even her most ardent champion
might hesitate to assert that any lyric addressed to her is the equal
of ‘Ae fond kiss’ or ‘Of a’ the airts’. Jessie Lewars and Jean Lorimer
both inspired better songs than Mary ever did.
But Burns’s tenderness, even for the women who meant most to him, was
often of a peculiar sort. Though he told Deborah Davies that ‘Woman
is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of precedency
among them, but let them all be sacred’, his practice was more
accurately summarized in what he said about love in confiding to George
Thomson his admiration for Jean Lorimer: