other reasons for being uncomfortable. Edinburgh was not a city in
which a gentlewoman could be indiscreet and get away with it. More
than a dozen years later Euphemia Boswell told Joseph Farington that
Edinburgh’s chief drawback was that everybody knew all his neighbours’
affairs. The poet’s visits to the Potterrow were freely discussed. Lord
Craig heard of them and was annoyed by his kinswoman’s indiscretion;
the Rev. Mr. Kemp heard of them and felt it his duty to admonish his
parishioner. When Clarinda confided these troubles to Burns they of
course roused him to new fervours of knight-errantry. Moreover, other
agitations were intensifying the emotional stress of the love affair.
A great lady named Mrs. Stewart who was expected to help his Excise
project chose to lecture him on the error of his ways; rumours were
afloat that William Creech was insolvent; above all there was bad
news from Mauchline. Jean’s parents had this time chosen the heavy
melodramatic role and had bidden their erring daughter not to darken
their doors again. She was being sheltered by friendly Mrs. Muir of
Tarbolton Mill, but her future was black. In these circumstances it is
unjust in the extreme to judge Burns’s conduct by the cool standards
of sobriety and sanity. The man was in such a state of frenzy that he
cannot be held accountable for his words nor even for all his actions.
What had begun as a flirtation and had continued, in part at least,
as a piece of play-acting had by the middle of February become an
imbroglio. Burns and Clarinda, both of them sentimentalists whose
roused emotions were stronger than their reason, had gone so far that
they could no longer regard their relations as simple friendship. By
the time Burns set out on the 18th for Mauchline by way of Glasgow he
had indulged in a perfect delirium of sentiment and rash vows. If he
had not actually pledged himself to wait until James M’Lehose should be
considerate enough to die and leave Clarinda free to marry Sylvander it
at least appears that she expected him to wait. Meanwhile they were to
write to each other every day.
The artificial and hothouse nature of the affair is fully demonstrated
by the change which came over Burns’s letters as soon as removal from
Edinburgh plunged him into the chilly air of everyday. The promise of
a daily letter was the first to fail. Burns reached Glasgow on the
evening of the 18th to find Richard Brown awaiting him at the Black
Bull Inn in the company of young William Burns, who had ridden up from
Mauchline with his brother’s horse. Before settling to a convivial
evening Burns managed to dispatch a hurried note to Clarinda, but it
was four days before he found time to write again. His next letter
shows how effectively those four days had brought him back from a
sentimental dream-world to crude reality. Doubtless William had brought
the latest bulletins about Jean, but no hint of them was passed on to
Clarinda. A feverish day of entertainment among the prosperous weavers
of Paisley was followed by two days of more decorous pleasure at
Dunlop House and then by another wild bout at Kilmarnock. The letter
from Kilmarnock is devoted mainly to a broadly humorous account of
his Paisley host’s troubles with a daughter who had been to boarding
school, a son who wanted a latchkey, and himself who thought it better
to re-marry than to burn. Not a word about Jean, scarcely a word about
worthy Mrs. Dunlop and none about artistic Miss Rachel and poetic Miss
Keith--in short, just such a letter as Burns might have written to
Bob Ainslie or Alexander Cunningham, and in comparison with all the
previous Clarinda correspondence as inappropriate as Falstaff in love.
But this letter jars on the reader only because it is wrong in its
context. Two which he wrote after his arrival at Mauchline on the
23rd jar for a different reason. Only one of these, however, was to
Clarinda. She had given him a couple of little shirts for Baby Robert,
who was being cared for at Mossgiel. As soon as he had delivered these
and seen his family, Burns set off to interview ‘a certain woman’ at
Tarbolton Mill. ‘I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her! I,
while my heart smote me for the prophanity, tried to compare her with
my Clarinda: ’twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper
beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. Here was tasteless
insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished
good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most
delicate, the most tender Passion. I have done with her and she with
me.’
Of the many things in Burns’s life which might better have been left
unsaid or undone this letter might claim first place were it not for
the one he wrote to Bob Ainslie ten days later. Here he describes his
reconciliation with Jean. What makes this letter revolting is not so
much its biological detail as the realization that the alleged events
which Burns describes occurred less than a fortnight before Jean’s
confinement. On March 3 she again bore her lover twins, who did not
live even long enough to be baptized. Still worse, if it is true, is
his assertion that he had sworn Jean ‘privately and solemnly never
to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should
persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my
life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl....’ Here,
however, it is more than possible that he was talking brazenly for
Ainslie’s edification; Henley’s doubt that Mrs. Armour could have been
reconciled to her daughter without a promise of marriage seems well
founded. Moreover the statement proves that by this time, whatever he
may have thought in 1786, Burns realized that the destruction of the
original marriage lines had not necessarily voided the contract.
Whatever he said or did at his first interview with Jean he must,
before he returned to Edinburgh in March, have made up his mind that
sooner or later he would acknowledge Jean as his wife. The letters to
Clarinda during the remaining two weeks of his absence were noticeably
lacking in fervour. They contained, however, more news about his
personal affairs, especially the doubts and uncertainties that still
kept him hesitating between farming and the Excise, than any of the
earlier ones did. An unsolved mystery in his life is the nature of his
relations with Clarinda during the fortnight he spent in Edinburgh
in March. To the modern reader with full knowledge of the facts the
fervour of his latest letters seems still more forced and artificial
than before, but it may be questioned if this truth was equally obvious
to Clarinda. Indeed their final meeting, at which Burns presented her
with a pair of drinking-glasses, a poem, and an inscribed copy of
Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’, clearly had enough romantic intensity to
satisfy even Clarinda. Herein lies the mystery. The later developments
prove that Burns had told her nothing of his reconciliation with Jean,
yet Burns was not a man who could ordinarily act a part convincingly.
This time he must have tried. The results, combined with anxiety over
livelihood, are displayed in a letter of March 20, in which he told
Richard Brown that worry over his lease, ‘racking shop accounts’ with
Creech, ‘together with watching, fatigue, and a load of care almost too
heavy for my shoulders, have in some degree actually fever’d me....
These eight days, I have been positively crazed.’
He returned to Mauchline on the 22d to receive his six weeks of
Excise instructions, publicly to acknowledge Jean as his wife, and
incidentally to compose a formula whereby to explain his action to his
friends and patrons:
‘I had a long and much-loved fellow creature’s happiness or misery
in my determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a
deposite.’
This statement with only slight variations he used to half-a-dozen
different correspondents. Whether he used it to Clarinda or not is
uncertain; he may have entrusted Ainslie with the delicate task of
breaking the news. However the news reached her, it quite naturally
angered her. If Burns wrote it to her she destroyed the letter, and we
know that he destroyed her reply calling him a Villain and accusing him
of perfidious treachery. When he visited Edinburgh again in February,
1789, she refused to see him and told Ainslie that she intended to keep
away from her windows while he was in town lest she catch a glimpse of
him in the street.
In the fall of 1791, however, she had a chance to reopen the
correspondence. Jenny Clow in June, 1788, had undertaken some sort of
legal action against Burns and one purpose of his return to Edinburgh
in the following February had been to settle with her. Whatever the
nature of the settlement it had not helped much. When in 1791 Jenny
somehow communicated with Clarinda, the latter found the girl ill,
destitute, and friendless, in a miserable lodging. Clarinda’s discovery
of the means whereby Sylvander had managed to keep his courtship on
so lofty a plane must have been humiliating and disillusioning, but
she was woman enough to turn her discovery to account. Her letter to
Burns described Jenny’s condition briefly and effectively and suggested
that there was a striking contrast between his practice and the high
principles of generosity and humanity which he professed. She meant
her letter to sting, and it did. Burns begged her to relieve Jenny’s
immediate needs and promised personal action at the first opportunity.
At this point Jenny vanishes from the record. What Burns did, whether
Jenny lived or died, whether her son lived or died, if he lived what
became of him--all these are questions without answers.
Meanwhile Clarinda had been attempting to re-establish her own life.
Her husband had sought a reconciliation, and she was planning to
join him in Jamaica. When Burns made his last visit to Edinburgh in
November, 1791, her departure was already arranged. She was fully
reconciled to Sylvander now, and for the first time their relationship
revealed simple and genuine emotion. The Arcadian names vanished in
the correspondence; she became ‘my dearest Nancy’ instead of Clarinda,
and when Burns returned to Dumfries, fully convinced that he had said
farewell forever, he produced the one really first-rate lyric Clarinda
ever inspired--‘Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever’.
The sequel was the last of the anti-climaxes which marked the affair.
Clarinda reached Jamaica to find James M’Lehose’s disposition not
sweetened by time, and a brood of mulatto children proved that he had
not suffered by her absence. She returned to Scotland on the same
ship which took her out. For some time after her return she did not
communicate with Burns. When she did so it was in terms of cautious
esteem which inspired him to so bombastic a reply that he shortly
afterwards tried to disguise its date by describing a transcript of
it as ‘the fustian rant of enthusiastic youth’. The first part of the
description is accurate. For Burns the episode was closed, and closed,
as it had opened, in posturing affectation of emotion. But Clarinda
lived on it for the rest of her long life, exhibiting his letters to
her friends after his death until some of them were worn to tatters.
Her caution, however, equalled her vanity. After some of the letters
had been surreptitiously transcribed and published in 1802 she went
over the manuscripts, destroying the addresses, scoring out or clipping
away proper names and erasing some of the more ardent love-making, and
being reduced at last in senile old-age to selling some of them for a
few shillings each. Sylvander’s was the happier fate after all.
Meanwhile, whatever bombast or adoration her husband was addressing to
Clarinda, the ‘certain woman’ was lavishing on Burns the devotion he
had wished for at his first meeting. Various stories are told of how
and when he acknowledged Jean as his wife. The probability is that he
never did so, in the sense of going through a formal marriage service.
On April 28th he confided to James Smith that ‘Mrs. Burns’ was Jean’s
‘private designation’; a month later, in a letter to Ainslie, he avowed
the title ‘to the World’. By Scots law, avowal in the presence of
witnesses constituted a legal, though irregular, marriage; a peculiar
letter to Smith at the end of June suggests that Burns even evaded this
legal requirement:
‘I have waited on Mr. Auld about my Marriage affair, & stated that
I was legally fined for an irregular marriage by a Justice of
the Peace.--He says if I bring an attestation of this by the two
witnesses, there shall be no more litigation about it.--As soon as
this comes to hand, please write me in the way of familiar Epistle
that, “Such things are.”’
In other words, he was asking Smith--who had not lived in Mauchline for
two years--to testify, but not on oath, that Burns had acknowledged the
marriage in his presence. Armed with Smith’s letter, and another, he
then presented himself again before the minister, who overlooked the
doubtful legality of the evidence as two years before he had allowed
Burns’s doubtful status as a bachelor. On August 5th Burns and Jean
made their formal appearance before the Kirk Session, avowed their
marriage as of 1786, and were readmitted to the communion after ‘Mr.
Burns gave a Guinea note for the behoof of the Poor.’
All this time Burns was alternating between Mauchline and Ellisland,
to the detriment of his interests in each place. A man absent from his
farm every other fortnight could scarcely expect work to go forward
quickly, but there were no living accommodations for Jean and young
Robert until in October a neighbour, moving into Dumfries for the
winter, offered Burns the use of his house. But the periods of absence
roused Burns once more to lyric fervour for Jean, and the man who six
months earlier had pledged undying devotion to Clarinda composed ‘Of a’
the airts’ in tribute to his wife.
But it was the last song that can with complete certainty be connected
with Jean. She sank before long to the status of a hard-working,
child-bearing domestic fixture, losing her good looks--at first sight
of her in 1790 John Syme concluded that Burns’s lyrics in her praise
were poetic licence--but keeping her equable temper and her devotion
to her husband. Of all the women who had loved Burns more or less, and
whom he, more or less, had loved, she alone had to live with him. And
yet she continued to love him, not weighing his merits, but pardoning
his offences. She had things to pardon, though when he married her
Burns thought he had shaken himself ‘loose of a very bad failing.’
Eighteen months after this announcement of reformation, Jean went home
to Ayrshire for a visit, and her husband strayed into the arms of Anne
Park at the Globe Inn. When the blonde barmaid in due course bore him
a child, and died in doing it, Jean took in the little girl and reared
her with ‘no distinction shown between that and the rest of their
children.’ Maria Riddell, whose words are just quoted, added that Burns
told her the story ‘with much sensibility’.
Burns could not take Jean into the society to which he was himself
admitted, so she remained unnoticed at home, tending the children and
keeping the house in slatternly Scots fashion, but with a sober Scots
thrift which probably accounted for her husband’s living within his
income and at last dying with little more than the debts incurred
during his final illness. Burns seldom spoke of her in his last years,
but when he did so it was ‘with a high tribute of respect and esteem’.
Maria Riddell--perhaps a prejudiced witness--states that ‘he did
not love her, but he was far from insensible to the indulgence and
patience, “the meekness with which she bore her faculties” on many
occasions very trying to the tempers of most individuals of our sex.’
One suspects, sometimes, that Burns would never have continued to love
any woman after he had won her; that no matter who she was, he might
still have summed up his marriage as he did to John Beugo:
‘Depend upon it, if you do not make some damned foolish choice,
[marriage] will be a very great improvement on the Dish of Life.--I
can speak from Experience, tho’ God knows my choice was random as
Blind-man’s buff. I like the idea of an honest country Rake of my
acquaintance, who, like myself, married lately.--Speaking to me of
his late step, “L--d, man,” says he, “a body’s baith cheaper and
better sair’t!”’--
Maria Riddell may have been one reason for Burns’s abrupt closure of
the correspondence with Clarinda in 1793. After Clarinda had refused
to continue it as an emotional communion he no longer needed it as an
intellectual one. He had found a woman friend who surpassed Clarinda as
much in intellect as she did in social position, and the only occasion
on which he reopened communications with Agnes M’Lehose was during his
subsequent estrangement from Mrs. Riddell--when he used the opportunity
to send Clarinda copies of the crude lampoons he had composed upon
Maria.
Walter Riddell, younger brother of Burns’s friend at Friars Carse,
had compressed a good deal of experience into the first twenty-eight
years of his life. After a short period in the army he had married
an heiress who within a year made him a widower and the owner of an
estate in Antigua. In 1790 he met at St. Kitts Maria Banks Woodley,
youngest daughter of the governor of the Leeward Islands, and after a
brief courtship married her when she still lacked two months of being
eighteen. Though Maria’s mother was a native of St. Kitts, the girl had
been born and educated in England and soon after their marriage the
young couple returned there.
According to one interpretation of a letter from Francis Grose to Burns
in January, 1791, they must have proceeded at once to an autumn visit
at Friars Carse, where Grose was also a guest. Grose told Burns that
‘after the Scene between Mrs. Riddell Jun^r and your humble Servant,
to which you was witness, it is impossible I can ever come under
her Roof again.’ The letter also refers to the Governor--‘a spoilt
Child with a Number of good Qualities’--whom its editor identifies as
Walter Riddell, Mrs. Riddell Junior being Maria. But there was also an
extremely senior Mrs. Riddell at Friars Carse, for Robert’s grandmother
lived with him. Hence the Junior may equally well have been Mrs. Robert
Riddell, and inasmuch as Maria had no roof of her own in Scotland until
1792, it is hard to see how any misconduct of hers could have shut
Friars Carse to Grose.
If this was really Maria’s first meeting with Burns it was an
inauspicious start. But the early stages of the friendship are obscure.
The extant correspondence does not begin until February, 1792, and by
that time Maria’s life was so truly invaluable to Burns that to lose
her would leave a vacuum in his enjoyments that nothing could fill up.
By this time, too, she was the mother of a daughter, born in England
in August, 1791. Her husband was again in Dumfries, negotiating for
an estate, and Maria had gone to Edinburgh with the double purpose of
seeking expert medical advice and finding a printer for her narrative
of her voyage to the West Indies. To this latter end Burns introduced
her to his old friend Smellie in a letter which paid the highest
compliments to her intellectual and literary accomplishments--if
it can be called a high compliment to say that her verses ‘always
correct, and often elegant’, were ‘very much beyond the common run of
Lady Poetesses of the day’. The introduction resulted in a friendship
between Smellie and Maria of which the written records, being more
decorous than Burns’s own letters to the printer, were published by the
latter’s biographer. Maria liked to collect curios, and her interest
in Smellie might perhaps be thus explained. But the gruff and erudite
printer’s continued interest in Maria is further evidence that she had
brains as well as charm, though her letters are evidence enough.
In the spring of 1792 Walter Riddell purchased the estate of Goldielea
near Dumfries, renamed it Woodley Park in Maria’s honour, and set up
as a country gentleman. More accurately, he paid a small deposit on
the purchase price without knowing how he would raise the main sum.
Burns visited frequently at Woodley Park, though its master bored
him. Walter Riddell apparently shared his brother’s convivial habits
without his brother’s modicum of literary and intellectual interests,
and the poet’s attitude towards him is more clearly shown by the almost
total absence of Walter’s name from his letters to Walter’s wife than
even by the crude epitaph which described the man as empty-headed and
poisonous-hearted.
In letter-writing at least the friendship with Maria reached perihelion
in the autumn of 1793. Walter was then in the West Indies, trying to
raise money on his estate there, and Maria was living alone at Woodley
Park with her books, her music, and two baby daughters. By this time
Burns was ponderously flirtatious. Maria was the first and fairest
of critics, the most amiable and most accomplished of her sex, and
it was the final proof of his unhappy lot that when he was in love
‘Impossibility presents an impervious barrier to the proudest daring
of Presumption, & poor I dare much sooner peep into the focus of Hell,
than meet the eye of the goddess of my soul!’ At least one impassioned
lyric which originally began ‘The last time I cam o’er the moor And
passed Maria’s dwelling’ had been composed and submitted to the lady’s
criticism accompanied by a postscript which transparently disclaimed
personal application. In Walter’s absence, many of their meetings
during this autumn were at the homes of mutual friends or at the little
receptions which Maria held between the acts in her box at the theatre.
These latter, however, were sometimes subject to interruptions. On
at least one occasion Burns found an army officer--‘a lobster-coated
puppy’--already in possession, and withdrew without even announcing
himself. Maria chided him for his failure to appear and invited him
formally to share her box at the next performance; he kept her supplied
with all his latest lyrics, including those addressed to Clarinda.
It would be a mistake to take Burns’s impassioned avowals too
seriously. Maria was a young and fascinating woman of the type which
pleases men better than it does members of her own sex, and Burns
thoroughly enjoyed her conversation. To the pleasures of intellectual
intercourse her company added a subdued erotic stimulation which he
expressed in the only language he knew. The very frankness of his
remarks and Maria’s calm acceptance of them is proof that they were
neither meant nor taken literally.
And then came the breach seemingly inevitable in Burns’s relations with
every woman of higher station. Its details are still obscure. Even its
exact date cannot be determined, though it must have been in Christmas
week of 1793. The traditional story is that Burns was dining at Woodley
Park and that the men’s talk over their wine somehow got round to the
Rape of the Sabines. It was drunkenly agreed that on returning to the
drawing-room the men should stage a burlesque of the episode. They did,
and Burns, singling out his hostess as his prey, put too much ardour
into the game. Mrs. Carswell interprets the thing as a deliberate rag
on the part of the other men to get Burns to make a fool of himself.
Such at any rate was the result. After a stormy scene during which some
of the other ladies present tried to intercede for the poet he was
ignominiously expelled. The next day he grovelled in contrition before
the offended lady in the painfully humiliating ‘letter from Hell’. She
refused to be placated and after two more abortive efforts on Burns’s
part the breach between them was complete.