& happiness of the beloved Object, is the _first & inviolate_
sentiment that pervades my soul; & whatever pleasures I might wish
for, or whatever might be the raptures they would give me, yet, if
they interfere & clash with that _first_ principle, it is having
these pleasures at a dishonest price; & Justice forbids, & Generosity
disdains the purchase!--As to the herd of the Sex, who are good for
little or nothing else, I have made no such agreement with myself; but
where the Parties are capable of, & the Passion is, the true Divinity
of love--the man who can act otherwise than as I have laid down, is a
Villain!--’
One fears that Burns remained on these chivalrous heights only when
the woman was unattainable; should she yield to him, she would too
readily take her place among ‘the herd of the Sex’. Certainly he
freely discussed his loves not only among his male friends but with a
patroness like Mrs. Dunlop. When, for instance, after his conquering
hero’s return to Mauchline in June, 1787, the Armours bade him welcome
and Jean succumbed once more, he lost no time in reporting the victory
to Smith and Ainslie. To put it briefly, beneath the veneer of
sentiment, beneath even the poetic response, Burns’s attitude towards
women of his own age was the elemental possessiveness which regards sex
primarily as a ribald jest. His sincerest tenderness belonged to no
woman as deeply as it did to his children, however or wherever begotten.
Burns never revealed more truly his own feelings than in the ‘Poet’s
Welcome to his Bastart Wean’ which hailed the birth of his eldest
child, Betty Paton’s daughter. Its mixture of bawdry with affection, of
rollicking defiance of the unco guid with exultant pride in paternity,
may distress the tender-minded who prefer not to admit the existence
in parental relations of even a sublimated carnality, but it is the
very essence of Burns himself. His plainest expressions of his love
for his children occur not in letters to women but in letters to his
most intimate male friends, and often amid flagrant ribaldry. It was
not to Mrs. Dunlop that he wrote that Jean’s first twins ‘awakened a
thousand feelings that thrill, some with tender pleasure and some with
foreboding anguish, thro’ my soul’; it was to Robert Muir, companion
of his revels and recipient of broad jests. Robert Aiken was told that
the feelings of a father outweighed in Burns all the sound reasoning
and all the bitter memories that joined in urging him to carry through
the Jamaica project. ‘God bless them, poor little dears!’ he exclaimed
to John Richmond on reporting the birth of the twins. Such remarks to
men before whom he had no motive for acting a part, are more convincing
proof of real feelings than are the dissertations, garnished with
quotations from James Thomson’s dramas, on parental anxieties in his
letters to Mrs. Dunlop.
Especially notable is the letter he wrote to Bob Ainslie on August
1, 1787, in response to the latter’s announcement of the birth of an
illegitimate son. Beginning, ‘Give you joy, give you joy, my dear
brother!’ he goes on to say that he has ‘double health and spirits
at the news’, and to welcome Ainslie to ‘the society, the venerable
Society of Fathers’. There follow eight lines of the metrical version
of Psalm 127, obviously quoted with as much sincerity as when he later
used it, in quite different context, in writing to John M’Auley.
He continues, ‘My ailing child is got better, and the Mother is
certainly in for it again, and Peggy [Meg Cameron] will bring me a half
Highlandman’, and announces his intention of getting a farm, bringing
them all up in fear of the Lord and of a good oak stick, and of being
the happiest man alive. Then the letter shifts to snatches of bawdy
song, some quoted, others apparently impromptu. This primitive joy
in paternity, this exultation over the mere fact of birth, whether
the child was his own or another’s, was part of his heritage from the
Scottish soil. The same spirit shows three years later in his reply to
Mrs. Dunlop’s news that her widowed daughter Mrs. Henri had borne a
posthumous son:
‘... I literally, _jumped for joy_--how could such a mercurial
creature as a Poet, lumpishly keep his seat on the receipt of the best
news from his best Friend--I seized my gilt-headed Wangee rod, an
instrument indispensably necessary in my left hand in the moment of
Inspiration & Rapture--and stride--stride--quick & quicker--out skipt
I among the broomy banks of Nith to muse over my joy by retail.’
Nor did his paternal emotions dissipate themselves in rejoicings over
birth. Testimony abounds of his devotion to his children, his concern
over their proper education, his anxiety for their futures. James Gray
on evening visits in Dumfries found him explaining poetry to the eldest
boy and hearing him recite his lessons; Maria Riddell was impressed
by his constant devotion to the children’s welfare. But towards their
mothers, once the fancy had passed, he was indifferent. ‘I am very
sorry for it, but what is done is done’, he said of Meg Cameron, and
though Clarinda’s rebuke stung him into something like remorse for
his treatment of Jenny Clow, even there his last thought was for his
son: ‘I would have taken my boy from her long ago, but she would never
consent.’ The one possible exception to his generalization was Jean
Armour, but Jean’s later history belongs elsewhere, beside Clarinda’s.
In brief, Burns’s experience among women up to his departure for
Edinburgh had made him the ‘magerfu’’ man Sentimental Tommy had
longed to be. His love-making might involve him in tangles which he
was neither astute nor callous enough to avoid, but he had found his
attraction enhanced by his reputation as a dangerous man. He had
learned the value of aggressiveness; he had not learned finesse. When
he met ladies his lack sooner or later became painfully evident.
Among women of the upper classes he was at his best in association with
those whose interest was motherly rather than actually or potentially
amorous. Before going to Edinburgh he had charmed middle-aged Mrs.
Stewart of Stair as well as mature Mrs. Lawrie, wife of the minister of
Loudoun, and had begun with Mrs. Dunlop a correspondence which ended
only on his deathbed. In its progress this friendship reveals much of
what was best in his relations with women; in the estrangement which
interrupted it it reveals also his shortcomings. Since, moreover,
it is the only one of his friendships in which both sides of the
correspondence have been preserved, no guess-work is required in
tracing its rise and decline.
Frances Anna Wallace Dunlop belonged by both birth and marriage to the
old landed gentry of Scotland, and claimed collateral descent from
Sir William Wallace. In the autumn of 1786 her mind was ‘in a state
which, had it long continued my only refuge would inevitably have been
a mad-house or a grave; nothing interested or amused me; all around
me served to probe a wound whose recent stab was mortal to my peace,
and had already ruined my health and benumbed my senses.’ Grief at
her husband’s recent death had something to do with it, but the chief
wound was her eldest son’s extravagance and marital scandals. About
the beginning of November a copy of the Kilmarnock _Poems_ reached her
and her reading of them--significantly enough it was ‘The Cotter’s
Saturday Night’ and other poems based on the genteel tradition of
eighteenth-century poetry that won her admiration--roused her to fresh
interest in life. ‘The poignancy of your expression’, as she put
it, ‘soothed my soul.’ To one reading her letters without reference
to her age she often sounds like a decrepit and almost dying woman.
Actually when she began writing to Burns she was only fifty-six, and
she outlived him by nineteen years. She opened the correspondence
with an order for six copies of the poems; the flattered poet could
scrape together only five, which he dispatched with a complimentary
letter that included the news that he was planning a second edition in
Edinburgh. Mrs. Dunlop immediately elected herself one of his chief
advisers, and among other things suggested that in revising his poems
he should avoid describing her great ancestor as ‘unhappy Wallace’ and
should make the Twa Dogs sit down more decorously. Later she offered
the two most inept of all the recorded plans for the poet’s future.
In February, 1787, she proposed that he should use the proceeds of
his Edinburgh subscription to buy a commission in the army. The man
who wrote ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ and whose dislike for
‘the lobster-coated puppies’ of the army more than once got him into
hot water would have cut a strange figure in any officers’ mess. On
April 1, 1789, she suggested his applying for the newly established
Professorship of Agriculture at Edinburgh University. The self-taught
peasant would have cut a still stranger figure as the colleague of
Robertson, Cullen, and Blair.
The history of the first few months of his friendship with Mrs. Dunlop
reveals how far Burns was from understanding the finer points of
etiquette. To begin with he ignored her suggestions for altering his
poems. True, he could do nothing else. Her advice was merely typical of
what genteel Scotland thought about his work. To accept all emendations
would have reduced his poems to namby-pamby; to accept some and reject
others would have doubly offended those whose criticism he ignored.
But he should have explained this to Mrs. Dunlop, and did not. Her
vexation at the discovery was intensified by an innocent blunder he
made in arranging for the delivery of copies she had ordered for her
stepmother, the dowager Lady Wallace of Craigie. The copies went
instead to the estranged wife of her eldest son, also a Lady Wallace
but regarded by her mother-in-law as the worst blemish the family tree
had ever suffered.
Their relations were first put on a really cordial basis when Burns
visited her at Dunlop House in July, 1787. Annoyance at his social
blunders evaporated before the charm of his personality, and thereafter
the correspondence on both sides took a new tone of affection and
esteem. Her interest in Burns was generous and motherly. She plied him
with good advice, which he generally ignored, and frequently added
substantial help with both money and influence. Towards her Burns seems
to have felt as many a man does towards his mother--she bored him but
he loved her. She often accused him, no doubt justly, of not reading
her letters. They were long, tedious, and wholly unpunctuated; he
probably glanced over them when they arrived and then laid them aside
for more careful reading at a leisure hour which never came. But though
he seldom answered her questions he took her unreservedly into his
confidence--or almost unreservedly. He never did more than hint about
Clarinda, but he told her everything about Jean. In fact he must have
told almost too much; it is hard otherwise to explain his embarrassment
over breaking the news that he had finally married the girl who had
borne him ‘twice twins in seventeen months’.
By the beginning of 1788 the friendship was so firmly established
as to survive a most humiliating incident. When he visited Dunlop
House on his way back from Edinburgh in February his reception was
warm and flattering. Mrs. Dunlop’s unmarried daughters were agog with
admiration. Miss Rachel was hard at work on a painting of his muse,
Coila, as to whose appearance she sought the poet’s expert advice. Miss
Keith discussed poetry with him and revealed the somewhat surprising
fact that she had never read Gray. Before he left he had promised to
lend the ladies his copy of Spenser, a recent gift from William Dunbar
of Edinburgh. When a few days later he fulfilled his promise he added
to the parcel a copy of Gray as a present for Miss Keith, only to learn
that a plebeian poet must not presume too far. Mrs. Dunlop replied that
she did not allow her daughter to receive presents from men who were
not members of her own family, and proposed either to return the whole
book or at most to permit Miss Keith to tear out the pages containing
the poems she liked best. That Burns continued in friendship with Mrs.
Dunlop after this rebuff is eloquent proof of the esteem in which he
held her; he had lampooned others of the gentry for less.
Not that this was the only time when Mrs. Dunlop made him conscious
of the difference in their ranks. Her occasional gift of a five-pound
note, though usually tactfully designated as for some special purpose
or occasion, always hurt his pride--the more so because he could not
deny that he needed the money. He silently drew the line, however,
when she proposed, in one of those fits of economy which sometimes
afflict the well-to-do, that he help to sell some decorative fringe
which she had been manufacturing. Over this as over others of his sins
of omission she displayed an irritability more like a schoolgirl’s
than a grandmother’s; most schoolgirlish in its evanescence. A thorough
scolding which sounded like a total breach of relations would be
countered by some new poems or new compliments from Burns, and her next
letter would contain a five-pound note for the latest baby.
Though as Burns became more heavily burdened with labour and
responsibility his letters grew shorter and fewer than at the peak
of the correspondence during the summer of 1788, no serious rift
appeared until December, 1792. When it came it was the result of
Burns’s pride working in combination with his want of tact. Among
the servants on Mrs. Dunlop’s estate was a milkmaid named Jenny
Little, whom Burns’s success had inspired to burst into rime. Burns
had already endured a good deal of her output, both from manuscripts
sent to him by Mrs. Dunlop and from a pilgrimage of adoration which
Jenny had made to Ellisland in 1790--an unsuccessful pilgrimage, for
she had found the poet laid up with a broken arm and in no mood for
entertaining an aspiring poetess. When Burns reached Dunlop in 1792 he
found his patroness’s interest in her protégée still unshaken. With
her assistance Jenny had recently printed her poems, and Mrs. Dunlop
produced the volume with the request that Burns give his opinion of
certain of the verses which she pointed out. He said, ‘Do I have to
read all those?’ in a tone which she afterwards described as the
equivalent of a slap in the face.
It was supreme tactlessness. Burns was bored and showed it. A more
politic man would have waded through the verses however much his jaw
might ache with suppressed yawns. But boredom was not the worst aspect
of the incident from Burns’s point of view: his pride was wounded. Of
all his patrons in the upper ranks of society Mrs. Dunlop alone had
kept up her interest in him and had appeared to treat him as an equal.
Now she unconsciously revealed that she saw no _essential_ difference
between his writing and Jenny Little’s. To her he was after all merely
a peasant poet with the accent on the adjective; the difference between
him and Jenny Little was a difference in degree and not in kind. Both
wrote in dialect; she failed to see that one wrote Scots poetry and the
other Scots twaddle.
The incident illustrates once more what Maria Riddell meant when she
described Burns as devoid in great measure of refinement and social
graces. The abrupt and masterful manner, successful with the girls of
his own original class, sooner or later annoyed other ladies besides
the Duchess of Gordon. Mrs. Dunlop, however, did not allow her vexation
to cause an immediate coolness; she contented herself with a lengthy
silence followed by an explanation of her reasons for being offended.
Yet when the real break came two years later Burns’s unbridled tongue
and pen were again at fault. Mrs. Dunlop heartily disapproved of his
sympathy with the French Revolution, and had warned him more than once
to drop the subject in his letters. Inasmuch as four of her sons and
one grandson were or had been in the army and two of her daughters
were married to French royalist refugees, Burns should have known that
her sympathies would be Tory. Yet in face of her warnings he wrote
in January, 1794, the most outspoken of all his political remarks,
describing Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as a perjured blockhead
and an unprincipled prostitute who had met their deserved fate at
the hangman’s hands, and adding a guarded hope that revolutionary
principles might have more scope in England. This time Mrs. Dunlop
broke off the correspondence. Though Burns made two attempts during
the next year to reopen it, she maintained dogged silence until his
pathetic letter of farewell, written on his deathbed, at last broke
down her reserve. Her letter of reconciliation was almost the last
message which reached him before his death. For a century charitable
biographers conjectured that the estrangement must have been due to the
lady’s hearing reports that Burns was living an evil life in Dumfries.
The recovery of the complete text of his letter of January, 1794,
revealed the simple truth that the breach resulted from nothing more
serious than a failure in tact. There, as always, his trouble came
because he had not taken heed to his ways, that he offend not with his
tongue.
The same trouble underlay his relations with other women of a rank
above his own--Margaret Chalmers, Agnes M’Lehose, and Maria Riddell,
though in different ways and different degrees. With Margaret Chalmers,
indeed, he maintained for a couple of years the nearest approach he
ever made to a non-flirtatious friendship with a woman of his own
age, but of the three just named this clever daughter of a gentleman
farmer in Ayrshire was the least removed in station from himself.
Unfortunately, only Burns’s side of the correspondence survives, and
that in fragments. Apparently it began, as usual, with love-making, but
when Margaret gently put a stop to that--probably by telling Burns that
she was already engaged to Lewis Hay, whom she married in 1788--their
relation ripened into a genuine friendship which produced what Cromek
rightly called some of the best letters Burns ever wrote. The poet took
her unreservedly into his confidence about his troubles with Creech
and his anxiety over his future, so that his three or four letters to
her during the height of his correspondence with Clarinda come like
a breath of bleak but pure air in that hothouse atmosphere. But the
friendship ended, apparently through Burns’s neglect. Two years after
her marriage he sent regards to her through another friend, and called
himself a wretch for not writing her, but seemingly he could not write
when he felt that his confidences might be shared with her husband. An
estranged husband would not have mattered, as his flirtation with Agnes
M’Lehose proved.
The Clarinda episode has more prominence in most accounts of Burns than
it deserves. In its beginning and growth it was in fact quite untypical
of the man--his one intensive effort to act a part not natural to
him. Its development in this way was mainly the result of the accident
which threw him back on letter-writing instead of speech in conducting
his suit. Agnes M’Lehose when Burns met her was a plump young matron
about his own age. Born Agnes Craig of Glasgow and a relative of one of
the Lords of Session, she had married in romantic haste at the age of
seventeen a young lawyer named James M’Lehose, and when Burns met her
had already had eleven years of leisure to repent. Her husband, after
abusing and neglecting her and getting into debt and disgrace, had
at last been exiled by indignant relatives to Jamaica--that tropical
refuge for Britons who had made their native climate too hot for
them. His wife, trying to rear three sickly children on a microscopic
annuity, had turned for consolation to literature and religion. In
the latter she had espoused under the dynamic preaching of the Rev.
John Kemp the strictest tenets of Calvinism; in the former she had
familiarized herself with the most elegant authors of the day and
had taken to versifying occasionally with the fluency and inaccuracy
prevalent among women poets prior to Christina Rossetti and Emily
Brontë. Like most of Edinburgh in 1787 she had been eager to meet
Burns. When at last she did so at a tea-party given by her friend, Miss
Erskine Nimmo, she and Burns became so visibly absorbed in each other
as to rouse the amusement of the other guests. The poet’s experiences
hitherto with young women of the upper classes had been disappointing.
They were polite and attentive, but reserved. Here at last was an
indubitable lady, and a young and attractive one at that, who displayed
something like the enthusiastic attention he had been accustomed to
receive from the belles of Mauchline. Before the tea was over Burns had
accepted Mrs. M’Lehose’s invitation to a party of her own. If ever a
woman threw herself at a man’s head Agnes M’Lehose did, and Burns was
not the man to refuse such a challenge. A letter to Richard Brown in
the early days of his infatuation leaves no doubt that he thought he
had made a conquest; but he had reckoned without Clarinda’s Calvinism
and her social traditions.
The affair might have spent itself in a passing flirtation had not
chance, in the form of a drunken driver who overturned a coach and
dislocated the poet’s knee, confined him to his room for several
weeks. His note explaining and deploring his inability to attend the
tea-party was answered by one offering sympathy and regret. Burns and
Mrs. M’Lehose both wielded free-flowing pens; their correspondence
rapidly gained momentum and fervour. By the third exchange of letters
she felt it her duty to remind him that she was a married woman. The
result may or may not have been what she intended. Assuring her that
his intentions were strictly honourable Burns seized the opportunity
to express far more ardent chivalry and devotion than he would
probably have ventured on had she been free. In reply she suggested
their writing under Arcadian pseudonyms--no doubt as evidence of
the strictly Platonic nature of their sentiments; displayed her
acquaintance with _The Spectator_ by calling herself Clarinda; and
suggested Sylvander for Burns. Having thus safely wrapped their
correspondence in asbestos they relaxed in a vapour-bath of emotion.
Less than three weeks after Burns’s accident he was assuring Clarinda
that she was a gloriously amiable fine woman and was promising
life-long devotion. But he was not admitting her as yet into his
inner doubts and perplexities. Margaret Chalmers was the only woman
who shared those. In fact both Sylvander and Clarinda seemed to have
reserved their more intimate communications for personal speech.
Apparently not until their long-deferred second meeting in January did
Burns tell her about Jean and his children and Clarinda give him the
whole tale of her unhappy marriage. She also sought in both speech and
writing to convert him to Mr. Kemp’s particular brand of Calvinism. But
here even at the height of his infatuation she failed. The most she got
was a partial recantation of his liking for the heroic qualities of
Milton’s Satan.
So long as communication was limited to pen and ink the affair for
Burns was little more than a literary exercise. After they began to
meet it became different and, in its effects on him, worse. Physical
nearness could not fail to stir a man of his temperament. Soon their
conversation was supplemented by caresses which Clarinda, however,
managed to keep within bounds. As a result, Burns left these interviews
with his blood at fever heat. A servant-girl named Jenny Clow,
successor to the Meg Cameron of the previous winter, provided the
consummation which Clarinda denied, and in due course added yet another
to his growing list of paternal, legal, and emotional perplexities.