Foremost among them is the fact that in his apology Burns blames his
host for constraining him to drink more than he wished to. Maria
had told Smellie in November that Walter Riddell was in the West
Indies and was not expected back until spring. On January 12th, when
the breach with Burns had already occurred, she again mentioned her
husband’s absence. If these letters were correctly printed by Smellie’s
biographer, Walter Riddell could not have been the host; therefore
the scene could not have occurred at Woodley Park. The alternative
explanation is that it really happened at Friars Carse, with Robert and
Elizabeth Riddell in the roles usually assigned to Walter and Maria. In
this case Maria, hearing of Burns’s conduct, must have undertaken to
discipline him.
Whatever the circumstances, Burns’s subsequent conduct was inexcusable.
During the early spring of 1794 he wrote several epigrams on Maria
which are utterly caddish, lacking alike in wit and decent feeling. One
of them he even offered to a London newspaper, the editor of which had
sense enough to reject it. He also wrote the long, dull, and vulgar
parody of Pope which bears the title ‘Esopus to Maria’ and which
attacks everything about Mrs. Riddell from her hair to her morals.
This last was meant for the ‘quite private’ delectation of John Syme
and one or two other intimates, but even if Burns had published it his
conduct could not have appeared in much worse light. The epigrams and
the ‘Monody on a Lady Famed for Her Caprice’ are enough in themselves
to put it beyond condoning.
While Burns was thus exhibiting the worst side of his nature, his
victims’ circumstances were changing. Walter Riddell had returned from
the Indies without the money he had gone to raise, and in the course
of the spring Woodley Park was repossessed by its former owner, Walter
forfeiting his £1000 deposit on the purchase price as well as all that
he had laid out in improvements. On April 21st Robert Riddell died,
and Friars Carse was put on the market, the relations between the
two families being so uncordial that Elizabeth Riddell refused any
settlement which would leave her brother-in-law in possession of the
estate. Walter and Maria attempted the usual expedient of impoverished
gentry--a prolonged stay on the Continent--but found their way barred
by the armies of the French Revolution. Accordingly after a few
months in England they returned to the neighbourhood of Dumfries to
resume life on a much reduced scale. They settled at Tinwald House, a
tumble-down estate near Lochmaben, or rather Maria settled, for her
husband was absent most of the time. In May, 1795, they moved again,
this time to Halleaths, between Lochmaben and Lockerbie, where they
remained until they left Scotland forever in 1797. How much Maria had
heard of Burns’s conduct towards her no one but herself knew, and she
never told. When Currie published some of the letters referring to the
quarrel she affected complete ignorance of their relation to herself,
though it is hard to believe that some kind friend had not shown them
to her.
If Burns showed the worst side of his nature in the quarrel, Maria
showed the best of hers in the reconciliation. Early in 1795 she made
the first move by sending him a book she had heard he wished to read.
He replied in a formal note in the third person which nevertheless
welcomed the overture and opened the way for further intercourse. By
the beginning of May he was writing in his old vein of flirtatious
gaiety and even confiding to Maria about the mysterious Reid miniature
of himself--mysterious because no one knows for whom he had it painted,
nor why. The woman who quarrelled with Burns in 1794 may have been
capricious, and have pushed her rigour further than was wise in dealing
with a man of Burns’s temperament. After all, twenty-one is not
infallible even when feminine and married. But the woman who reinstated
Burns in her good graces in 1795, after his caddish attacks upon her,
was certainly not petty.
The renewed friendship had not long to live. Shadows of another sort
soon began to fall across it, for Burns’s health was breaking. A note
written at the end of May to accompany the loan of the Reid miniature
mentioned that he was so ill as scarcely to be able to hold pen to
paper; a month later he feared that his health was gone forever. The
autumn brought further affliction in the death of his little daughter,
and it was to Maria that he uttered the only existing record of his
grief: ‘That you, my friend, may never experience such a loss as mine,
sincerely prays R B.’
And so, through bereavement, illness, and despair, the passionate,
irritable poet and the vivacious young woman of the world drew towards
their last meeting. The bleak little watering-place, the Brow Well
on the Solway, was the scene. Maria’s health also was bad, and she
evidently, like Burns, lacked the funds to take her to a better resort.
On the 5th of July, 1796, she sent her carriage for Burns: not until
she saw him did she realize how serious his condition was.
He was dying, and knew it. His overdriven heart, which had never wholly
recovered from the strain of doing a man’s work on insufficient food
at the age of fourteen, was giving out, and he was hastening his end
according to the best medical advice in Dumfries. A doctor who thought
that angina was ‘flying gout’ had ordered sea bathing, and the dying
poet was plunging himself daily in the chilly waters of the Solway, as
he had earlier in life sought to cure fainting-fits in a tub of cold
water at his bedside. Maria was startled by the visible stamp of death
on the features of the emaciated man who tottered from her carriage,
and her concern was increased by his almost total inability to eat. But
the presence of a young and attractive woman could still, as always,
rouse Burns to his best efforts, and his talk might even have been
gay--after his preliminary, ‘Well, Madam, have you any messages for the
other world?’--had Maria been able to forget his haggard countenance
long enough to reply in kind.
As it was, they had ‘a long and serious conversation about his
present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly
prospects.’ The man who had never lied about himself, to himself or
others, now frankly faced the fact that he was dying. And the presence
of a sympathetic and intelligent listener urged him on to speech about
the matters nearest his heart. Two things perturbed him on the brink
of the grave--anxiety for his family, and anxiety for his fame. His
eldest son was not yet ten; there were three younger, and Jean was
hourly expecting a fifth; at least two others needed a father’s help to
lighten the stigma of illegitimacy. And as for his literary reputation--
‘He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise,
and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to
the injury of his future reputation: that letters and verses written
with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished
to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity
or malevolence when no dread of his resentment would restrain them
or prevent the censures of shrill-tongued malice or the insidious
sarcasms of envy from pouring forth all their venom to blast his
fame.’
Could Burns have looked into the future, the prospect would have
deepened the pain in his harassed soul. His anxiety for his family
would have been allayed, to be sure, but not even in his darkest hour
could he have visualized the future of his personal and literary
fame. He foresaw attacks of his enemies; he did not foresee the
cowardice or treachery of his friends. He need not have worried about
his trivial or unguarded writings, for time automatically washes away
the sand and leaves the gold, if gold there be, and the publication
of trifling letters cannot harm their writer if the pattern of his
soul itself is not trifling. That spiritual descendants of Holy Willie
should deplore his best and strongest work and shake their heads over
passions of which their impotent pulses were incapable, that enemies
eager for revenge and underlings eager for drink should lie about their
relations with him--these things were to be expected. But that Bob
Ainslie, turned pious, should exemplify his own piety by preserving and
circulating Burns’s worst letters, that George Thomson should not only
ignore his dying wishes but even, before his corpse was in the grave,
rush into print with a distorted and melodramatic version of his last
years which would set the tone of biographies for a century to come,
that Gilbert should lack the courage to deny stories which he knew to
be false--all this, and much more, was mercifully hidden from him. But
it would have warmed his heart to know that the one intimate friend who
would come before the world with a truthful account of his character,
extenuating nothing, and setting nothing down in malice, was Maria
Riddell, on whom he had made unforgivable attacks, and who nevertheless
had forgiven him. The woman with whom the dying poet talked that day
until the distant bulk of Criffel turned dark against the sunset, and
the chill tide in which he had been ordered to bathe ebbed away from
the dismal flats of the Solway, was to prove herself the most devoted
friend of her sex he had ever had, Jean Armour always excepted.
V
LIVELIHOOD
To Burns in the vigour of his early manhood the question of livelihood
seemed easily answered. He was a good enough ploughman to be assured
of the porridge and the few shillings a week which a skilled labourer
could earn on a Scottish farm. There was no degradation in such
service. The labourers, like the hired help on New England farms, ate
with the family and took whatever share in the conversation they were
capable of. Moreover, anyone, whatever his rank, who was capable of ‘a
sensible crack’ was sure of welcome in households which had either to
provide their own entertainment or go without. Not even the prospect of
dependent old age held any terrors. The tradition of the blue-gowns, or
licensed beggars, still persisted in rural Scotland. An old man past
work who could talk interestingly could count on a meal and a place
by the fire at almost any farmer’s ingle. Burns seriously thought of
this as a possible end of his own life. The expression of the idea in
several poems might be dismissed as rhetoric had he not repeated it
in the sober prose of his letters. He actually pictured himself as
spending his manhood in labour, love-making, and poetry and his old age
as a sort of Edie Ochiltree.
Such a vision of course was adolescent. To fulfil it a man must have
no dependents. Burns seems to have imagined at first that if he could
help to keep the home together until his brothers and sisters were able
to establish themselves his responsibilities would end. The liberation
of his poetic talent entailed among other things a shrinking from the
burdens of marriage on narrow means. His rejected proposal to Alison
Begbie had come before his realization of his poetic calling; his
rejected offer to Jean Armour in 1786 was the result of sympathy for
her condition and not of a desire to settle down. But he soon learned
that he could not so simply escape responsibility. His children must be
provided for somehow even if he did not marry their mothers. Despite
the casualness with which he incurred paternity his parental feelings
were strong. ‘_Vive l’amour et vive la bagatelle_’ sounded well as
a motto until it was confronted by the actual problem of helpless
lives which owed their existence to him. As a Man of Feeling he could
not, even had he wished to, turn his back on them with Don Juan-like
callousness. Besides, the law might have something to say in the
matter--as Burns learned in the course of four suits or threatened
suits by four different women within two years. Unless he chose to flee
the country and repudiate his obligations he had to provide himself
with settled livelihood.
For a man of his rank and education the possible choices open in
1786 were limited. He could continue as a farmer; he could attempt
to support himself by writing, or he could seek a salaried position
at home or in the colonies. Each alternative had its drawbacks. By
the beginning of 1786 his reputation in the community was such that
he could scarcely continue the partnership at Mossgiel, but he lacked
the capital necessary for setting up independently elsewhere. The hope
of any large financial returns from his poetry seemed too fantastic
for consideration; he lacked the training for journalism or hackwork
when Grub Street was crowded with penniless university men. There
remained the chance of some salaried position. Yet even if he had been
temperamentally fitted for a commercial job he was by this time too
old. Merchants’ clerks began their apprenticeship as boys in their
teens. Burns was twenty-seven. A post in the Excise Service might be
feasible but was not easy to get. All government jobs went by favour,
and despite the unpopularity of the service among the people at large
the number of aspirants so far exceeded the available places that
the endorsement of some influential person was almost essential. The
same thing was true of India, where the East India Company’s monopoly
gave patronage as large a part as it had in the government services.
The United States, not yet united, were in economic chaos; Canada was
undeveloped. There remained the West Indies, then at the height of
a prosperity built on slave labour, where independent planters with
Scottish connexions were numerous enough to make it possible for a
Scotsman with the necessary introductions to secure some sort of work.
The story of Burns’s struggle for livelihood is the story of his
efforts in each of the four possibilities open to him.
The West Indian venture was the only one which never came to actual
trial. The documents are lost which would settle the date at which
Burns began seriously to consider emigration, but his mind was made
up at the very beginning of 1786. Through friends in Ayrshire he
obtained the offer of a position at thirty pounds a year as clerk and
overseer on a Jamaica plantation. The story is still repeated that he
published the Kilmarnock _Poems_ to pay his passage-money, but his own
contemporary account of the matter is sufficient refutation. He had
already arranged to go to Jamaica, his employer to pay his fare and
deduct the sum from his first year’s salary, before he decided to print
the poems. For Burns emigration was not only flight but almost a death
sentence. He had some justification for his feeling. The West Indian
climate helped to insure the financial success of a small minority of
white immigrants by killing off most of their rivals. He published his
poems because he wished, before saying farewell forever to Scotland,
to leave behind some tangible memorial. When the publication proved so
unexpectedly successful it immediately cancelled his flight.
Burns’s first extant reference to Jamaica is in a letter to John
Arnot of Dalquhatswood, which was written in April, 1786, when the
subscription for the _Poems_ was well under way. Negotiations were then
almost complete: by June 12th Burns was able to announce that the
ship was on her way home that was to take him out; on August 14th he
explained that he was entering the employ of Charles Douglas of Port
Antonio and all that remained to settle was the route by which he was
to travel. In view of the time required for exchange of letters between
Scotland and the West Indies it is certain that the correspondence with
Douglas must have begun in the winter, before the Kilmarnock volume was
planned and while a considerable part of it was still unwritten. As the
troubles with the Armours thickened during the summer so did Burns’s
references to his impending emigration. During July and the first part
of August he was announcing that he had booked passage from Greenock
to Savannah-la-Mar in the _Nancy_, sailing about September 1. Then
returned Jamaicans advised him that the route was too roundabout, and
when the captain of the _Nancy_ notified him that the ship was about to
sail, Burns decided that the notice was too abrupt. The _Nancy_ sailed
without him, and he transferred his booking to the _Bell_, which was to
sail direct to Port Antonio at the end of September.
The truth was that he was already wavering. The enthusiastic reception
of his poems, the interest which influential gentlemen began to take in
his welfare, were changing his opinion of himself and his prospects in
Scotland. Moreover, the Armours were calming down; friends had promised
to help him should Jean’s father renew the effort to execute his
warrant. Nevertheless he did not immediately abandon the Jamaica plan.
Though the _Bell_ in her turn sailed without him, he still watched the
shipping news as he collected his subscriptions and set his affairs
in order. Jean’s twins, born on September 3rd, increased the need for
settled livelihood, but increased also his reluctance to leave Scotland.
Most of his letters of the autumn of 1786 have perished. As late
as October he was still talking of emigration, though he had again
postponed it after actually packing his trunk and starting for Greenock
at the end of September. He still feared, he told Robert Aiken, that
‘the consequences of his follies’ might banish him; in other words,
Betty Paton was threatening to sue him. The Armour affair had already
been compromised by dividing the responsibility for the care of the
twins between the two families. When the extant correspondence resumes
a month later, Jamaica had been discarded. By November 1st the poet had
decided to try his luck in Edinburgh. For this reversal the Kilmarnock
volume was directly responsible.
When Burns had begun in April to solicit subscriptions for a volume
of his poems he had had no idea of making it a commercial success.
The book was intended as a memento of himself--a souvenir for his
friends and a final and unanswerable fling at his enemies. He probably
hoped for no more material return than would cover the expenses of
publication. Its success therefore was all the more intoxicating.
Six hundred and twelve copies were printed, of which about half were
subscribed for in advance, thanks mainly to Robert Aiken. When the
book came out at the beginning of August it furnished the first
literary sensation Ayrshire had ever known. The subscribers’ copies
were passed from reader to reader, creating such a demand that the
entire edition was sold within three months. When Mrs. Dunlop ordered
six copies in mid-November only five were left. At the end of July
Burns had been a fugitive with a warrant out against him, to escape
which he was shifting from one friend’s house to another. Two weeks
later he was a celebrity. His journeys through the country as he
collected his subscriptions became a sort of royal progress. The fact
that he was making a profit out of the book meant far less to him than
the applause of all sorts and conditions of men. People of influence
assured him that something could be done for him at home, though they
were vague as to precisely what. After the printer’s bills were paid
the volume showed a profit of more than £50, though forfeited deposits
on passage money and a substantial payment to Betty Paton reduced his
net gain to about twenty. But Burns still had no wish to write poetry
for money. He considered that ‘downright Sodomy of Soul’. Poetry was
his calling, but he refused to think of it as his livelihood.
Another man for other reasons doubted the commercial prospects of
poetry. In spite of the handsome balance-sheet of the first edition,
John Wilson, the Kilmarnock printer, declined to undertake a second
without advance payment for all labour and materials. He felt that
the first had glutted the market. His timidity helped to transform
Burns from a local celebrity into a national figure. When friends in
Mauchline and Ayr suggested republishing the poems in Edinburgh Burns
thought it an attractive but impractical dream. But when copies of
the book reached people of influence in the capital and they repeated
the suggestion it wore a different look. By October the hope of a
favourable reception in the city had come to Burns from at least three
different sources. His friend, the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun, had
sent a copy of the book to Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet; Blacklock
had commended it warmly and had even promised--not so warmly--to bring
it to the attention of Hugh Blair. The famous professor of rhetoric,
Blacklock thought, was too refined in his taste to relish it. Another
eminent professor was not so finicky. Dugald Stewart, whose country
home was at Catrine a few miles from Mauchline, read and enjoyed the
poems, invited the poet to dinner, and added his personal encouragement
to the Edinburgh venture. Finally the book reached even the peerage.
On November 1st Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Earl of Glencairn’s
estates, wrote that he had showed the poems to the Earl and that the
Earl had expressed his pleasure in them and his desire to befriend
their author. This approbation was heartening as Blacklock’s and
even Dugald Stewart’s could not be. The Earl had a reputation for
generosity and for keeping his word; he was one of the most popular
and influential peers in Scotland and his endorsement would have
weight with the people of wealth and fashion on whom the success of a
subscription would have to depend. But the Earl had nothing to do with
the abandonment of Jamaica. The same letter which brought the news of
the Earl’s interest also brought Dalziel’s congratulations on Burns’s
giving up his plans for leaving the country. What Glencairn really did
was to confirm the poet in his determination to offer his poems to a
larger audience.
Undoubtedly Burns realized before he went to Edinburgh that he was
setting out on the old and painful quest of patronage--a quest which
had broken the hearts of more poets than it had ever freed from
penury. But it was still fame more than money that he looked for from
his poems. He continued to hope for some means of modest livelihood
independent of his writing; if his subscription brought a little
capital to help him on his way, so much the better. When he reached
Edinburgh he made no effort to appear more than he was; he even sought
deliberately to appear less. He dressed as a plain young farmer, and
finding that the metropolitan critics were praising his work as that
of an unlettered ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration he did his
best to act the part. When Robert Anderson pointed out in private
conversation some evidence of extensive knowledge of other poets Burns
readily admitted his indebtedness, but in public he would not permit
his claims to pure inspiration to be challenged. If an unlettered bard
was what his patrons wanted he would do his best to be one. Many
times, however, his role was trying, especially when stupider people
than himself condescended, and gave him good advice.
Undoubtedly there were matters in which he needed good advice, but he
did not get it even from the patrons who did not condescend. Among
all his new friends there was no one to take his part as Sir Walter
Scott later took Southey’s in seeing that he got a fair contract with
his publisher. Glencairn had been as good as his word in securing
fashionable subscriptions. The Countess of Eglinton made the Earl
subscribe ten guineas; the entire membership of the aristocratic
Caledonian Hunt put down their names, but altered the first proposal
that they give two guineas each to a mere subscription at the regular
price. But Glencairn knew nothing about the business end of publishing.
In introducing Burns to William Creech, his brother’s former tutor and
the best-known publisher in the city, Glencairn no doubt felt that
he had done his best. He had, up to that point, but at that point a
good contract lawyer was needed. Unfortunately Henry Mackenzie and the
other men of letters in the city still adhered to the convention of the
writing gentleman who was supposed to disdain pecuniary rewards. A few
years earlier, when David Hume was alive, Burns might have been secured
better terms; a few years later under the leadership of Scott he would
certainly have secured them. Burns’s perverse pride would not allow him
to haggle over a contract which in any case offered more ready money
than he had handled in all his previous life. What he needed and did
not have was a hard-boiled business friend to do his haggling for him.