immediate risks and perhaps to receive a modest immediate profit, but
which reserved the long-term earnings for the publisher alone. As was
often the case with books published by subscription, the man whose
name appeared on the title-page was not the publisher in the modern
sense, but merely the author’s agent. He provided the facilities for
collecting the subscriptions and distributing the books, but took none
of the financial responsibility. The author received the entire payment
for the subscribers’ copies, but out of these receipts had to pay the
printer, the bookbinder, and also, presumably, the transportation
charges on copies delivered out-of-town. Furthermore, the agents who
distributed the books naturally expected to be paid. Hence Burns,
wherever possible, enlisted his friends for this service--Alexander
Pattison at Paisley, for instance, and Robert Muir at Kilmarnock--and
when that was not feasible still sought to avoid the regular
booksellers because they took ‘no less than the unconscionable, Jewish
tax of 25 p^r Cent. by way of agency’.
The price to subscribers was set at the modest sum of five shillings,
and close to three thousand subscriptions were obtained. Burns objected
to printing the names of the subscribers--quite naturally, for the
thirty-eight pages meant money out of his pocket merely to gratify the
vanity of people yearning to see their names in print as patrons of
literature--but was overborne by some friends whom he did not ‘chuse
to thwart’. Professor Snyder calculates Burns’s utmost possible gross
receipts from the subscription at £750. But after all charges were paid
the net profit cannot have been more than half that sum. He told Mrs.
Dunlop that he cleared about £540, but there, as in a similar statement
to John Moore, he was reckoning in Creech’s payment of 100 guineas for
the copyright.
That was the sum agreed on when, just as his book was ready for
delivery, Burns decided, ‘by advice of friends’ to dispose of his
copyright. Once more he had sought the advice of others, and once
more they told him the wrong thing. In this instance, the person
most at fault was Henry Mackenzie, to whom Burns and Creech referred
the question. Mackenzie was a lawyer, and ought to have warned Burns
against the absolute sale of his rights in a potentially valuable
piece of property. Instead Mackenzie contented himself with naming
one hundred guineas as his idea of a fair price. That was on April
17. Creech delayed his acceptance until the 23rd, on the pretence of
waiting to hear if Cadell and Davies would buy a share for their London
trade, but finally consented to ‘take the whole matter upon himself,
that Mr. Burns might be at no uncertainty in the matter.’ Thereupon
Creech left town, without either paying the money or giving his note
for it. A few days later Burns himself started on his Border tour,
still without any legal contract with Creech, but with his hands full
for the time being with the task of arranging deliveries, collecting
subscriptions, and paying the printer and the binder. Had not Peter
Hill, then Creech’s chief clerk, taken a good part of the burden on
himself, Burns would have been swamped under the worry of larger
transactions than he had known in all his life before.
In August Burns returned to Edinburgh, but Creech was either again
absent or again coy. Not until October 23 did the publisher at last
set his hand to a note promising to pay the sum ‘on demand’. How soon
Burns began to ask for payment is uncertain, but by January Creech
had delayed and evaded so often that Burns ‘broke measures with
[him], and ... wrote him a frosty keen letter. He replied in forms of
chastisement’, promised payment on a set date--and broke his promise.
To add to the poet’s anxiety, rumours were afloat. It was hinted
that Creech was on the verge of bankruptcy; it was also hinted that
he had cheated Burns by secretly printing additional copies of the
_Poems_, which he sold for his own profit. Burns bewailed his own fate
as a ‘poor, d-mned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool’; two months
later ‘that arch-rascal Creech’ was still making promises, and still
reneguing. Not until May 30, more than seven months after he had agreed
to pay ‘on demand’, did Creech at last part with his hundred guineas.
And even then Burns’s troubles were not over. Still another visit to
Edinburgh, at the end of February, 1789, was necessary before Creech
paid over the final sums due the poet for subscription copies, so that
at last he could report to Jean: ‘I have settled matters greatly to
my satisfaction with Mr. Creech.--He is certainly not what he should
be nor has he given me what I should have, but I am better than I
expected.’
The estimate of Creech was temperate enough; indeed, it erred, like
Burns’s statement to John Moore that Creech had ‘been amicable
and fair’ with him, on the side of charity. It is easy to condone
Mackenzie’s blunder and Creech’s sharp bargain on the ground that
neither of them could guess the future value of the copyright, but it
is impossible to excuse Creech’s postponements of the day of reckoning.
Prompt settlement of accounts after the book was published would have
sent Burns back to the country with his pockets comfortably lined and
with some of the glowing enthusiasm of his first season in Edinburgh
still undimmed. By his paltry delays Creech kept the poet in the city
until the interest of his fashionable ‘patrons’ had waned, until all
the pleasure of publication and fame had evaporated in bitterness
and disgust, and until the mere necessities of living must have made
considerable inroads on his irreplaceable capital.
Indeed one of the extraordinary facts about Burns’s life in Edinburgh
is that he emerged from it without greater depletion of his capital.
Contemporary report calls him dissipated. Yet somehow Burns managed
to spend nearly a year and a half either in residence in Edinburgh or
in journeying to and fro, and still came out with about four hundred
and fifty pounds. So far as is known he had no income from July, 1786,
when he assigned his rights in Mossgiel to Gilbert, until he reaped
his harvest, such as it was, at Ellisland in the autumn of 1788. Even
then he netted little, for the outgoing tenant exacted a price of £72
for the standing crops. However great his experience in the distracting
‘task of the superlatively Damn’d--making one guinea do the business of
three’--his twenty pounds from the Kilmarnock volume cannot have lasted
long, and if there were any gifts except the Earl of Eglinton’s ten
guineas and the same sum from Patrick Miller he nowhere mentions them.
If Burns dissipated heavily he managed somehow to do it without heavy
expenditure, an art few people have ever learned.
The possibility that he received funds from Gilbert even after the deed
of assignment must be ruled out. The flow of funds in fact was the
other way. The supposedly careful and efficient Gilbert was in constant
difficulties at Mossgiel. Robert sent him ten pounds from Edinburgh
in the spring of 1787; during the following winter he authorized John
Ballantine to pay over to Gilbert about thirty pounds of subscription
money then in Ballantine’s hands. And this was only the beginning. The
letter to Gavin Hamilton already quoted indicates that Gilbert was so
far in arrears with his rent in March, 1788, that Hamilton wanted Burns
to sign some sort of a note for him. This Burns refused to do, because
he had already lent Gilbert £200--nearly half his receipts from the
Edinburgh edition. Whether the previous payments were counted as part
of this loan or not is uncertain; probably they were not, for after
the poet’s death John Syme declared that Gilbert owed £300, though the
legal accounting sets the figure at £200. It seems likely therefore
that Gilbert regarded the earlier payments as gifts, and that the sum
which Gilbert at last repaid to his brother’s family represented the
final loan in 1788. As part of the interest on the loan Burns arranged
that Gilbert should pay his mother an annuity of £5 a year and should
continue to care for Betty Paton’s daughter. The result was that
Gilbert made no cash payment during Burns’s life, and never was able
to pay off the principal until he undertook to re-edit the _Poems_ in
1820. Burns had given most substantial proof of his loyalty to his
family and in doing so had destroyed his only hope of success in his
own venture at Ellisland.
Gilbert and his mother and sisters were not the whole of Burns’s
responsibilities. His younger brother William was approaching manhood
and turned naturally for support to the celebrity of the family. He
appears to have been an amiable but ineffective youth. He had served
at least part of an apprenticeship as a saddler, and in the autumn of
1787 Burns made some fruitless efforts to find him a job in Edinburgh.
A year or so later William set out to look for employment and held jobs
briefly in Longtown, in Newcastle, and finally in London, where he
died of typhus and where his funeral was arranged by John Murdoch and
paid for by Burns. Burns’s letters to this brother during his year of
wandering consist in about equal proportion of exhortations to brace
up and be a man and of enumerations of gifts--shoes and shirts and
waistcoats and above all money. Burns’s position as family capitalist
was no sinecure.
While he was struggling with Creech and trying to keep Mossgiel afloat,
Burns was constantly harried by the problem of his own future. The only
two possibilities he could see were a farm of his own or a post in the
Excise, and for a long time there seemed little chance of achieving
either. He had no intention of trying again for public aid through his
writing. One subscription might be regarded as a public tribute; a
repetition would look like begging. Besides, his common sense told him
that a second subscription would have little hope of success unless it
came at a long interval after the first and for work of a different
character. He had not exhausted his talents, but he had exhausted his
novelty. For the rest of his life he steadfastly refused to accept
payment for anything he wrote and actually gave away poems which make
up two-thirds of the bulk of his collected works. His sole payment for
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ was a dozen copies of the proof-sheets; his payment
for Creech’s second edition in 1793--which included ‘Tam’ and a score
of other new poems--was twenty presentation copies grudgingly allowed
him. His fondness for making gestures of gallant but unwise generosity
can hardly be better illustrated than by his dealings with Creech over
this edition. The publisher wrote to him in 1791, proposing a reissue
of the work and asking Burns to contribute some new poems to it, but
without suggesting payment for them. Burns told Cunningham that he had
taken a damned revenge of Creech by ignoring his letter. Yet a few
months later he relented, and after reminding Creech that the new poems
were his own absolute property, turned them over to him without asking
any payment except the twenty gift copies. Such a gesture might have
shamed some publishers, but Creech merely accepted it as his right. In
the same spirit Burns hotly resented George Thomson’s payment of £5 for
his contributions to the first number of the _Select Scotish Airs_,
and Thomson, like Creech, felt no compunction at accepting the poet’s
quixotic generosity.
On at least two occasions, moreover, Burns was offered pay for
journalistic writing in party newspapers. The origin, extent, and
duration of his relations with Peter Stuart of the London _Star_ are
all obscure, but it is plain that Stuart as a zealous Whig tried to
get Burns as a regular contributor. The poet refused. When he struck
off a satirical skit he was willing to give it to Stuart, but the
only pay he accepted was a free subscription to the paper. Thus he
managed to acquire the reputation, injurious to his hopes in government
employ, of being a partisan writer without any reward except notoriety.
Again in 1794 Patrick Miller, Jr., his landlord’s son who had been
put into Parliament at the age of twenty-one, persuaded James Perry
of the London _Chronicle_ to offer Burns what for those days was a
fair salary if he would come to London and devote his talents to the
press. Again Burns refused. He realized well enough that the prosperity
of a newspaper was often short-lived and he feared to jeopardize his
children’s future by exchanging an assured though meagre income for
the chances of the journalistic profession. Besides, the writer in a
partisan paper in 1794 was risking jail as well as economic insecurity,
as the sedition trials then in progress had proclaimed to all the
kingdom.
But if he was not to support himself by writing how was he to support
himself? That question hammered in his mind from the time he abandoned
the Jamaica project until the early spring of 1788. Even before he went
to Edinburgh he had thought of the Excise. But he found his Edinburgh
patrons cold to all hints. These gentlemen reasoned simply. Burns
was the ploughman poet: ergo, he should continue to plough. The only
definite gesture made towards getting him government work was Mrs.
Dunlop’s. She offered an introduction to Adam Smith in the hope that
Smith might help him to a job in the customs, but the philosopher had
left for London the day before Burns presented his letter. Moreover
Smith no longer took an interest in much except his own health, and if
Burns sought later to renew his application nothing came of it. His
most favourable opportunity to cultivate the acquaintance of high
officials was lost when he allowed William Nicol to drag him away from
Blair Athole, where Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise,
was one of the guests, and where Henry Dundas was shortly to appear.
Meanwhile an offer of another sort was being pressed upon him. He had
been in Edinburgh only a few weeks when the prosperous and enthusiastic
Patrick Miller sought his acquaintance. Miller, after a varied career,
at sea and as a banker, had retired from business with a comfortable
fortune and was devoting himself to miscellaneous experiments. He
was the sort of capitalist who is a godsend to struggling inventors,
for his enthusiastic imagination enabled him both to visualize the
inventor’s aims and to overlook all the practical details and delays
which intervene between a project and its fulfilment. His strongest
enthusiasm at the moment was the improvement of navigation, but his
interests also included agriculture. Not long before Burns came to
Edinburgh Miller had bought the run-down estate of Dalswinton near
Dumfries, and it was Ellisland, one of the farms on this estate, which
he urged upon Burns.
The poet was afraid of it from the start, and for good reason.
Miller, he said, was no judge of land, and what Miller thought was an
advantageous offer might ruin his tenant. Had Burns been gifted with
second-sight he could not have prophesied more accurately. Yet the
difficulty he always found in saying ‘No’ to people whose intentions
were friendly combined with his own inclinations to keep him from
refusing Miller’s offer outright. Farming was the business he knew
best, and a farmer’s life he held was the best of lives--if one could
live by it--but Mount Oliphant, Lochlie, and Mossgiel had been a triple
lesson on the fate of the tenant who undertook a lease without capital
enough to stock a farm profitably. Even if the Dalswinton farm were all
that Miller thought it, Burns doubted if his literary profits would
suffice to give him a start. However, he agreed to look at Ellisland
when he reached Dumfries at the end of his Border tour. When he did
so he could scarcely have been in the mood for a really critical
examination. The savage hospitality he had experienced for the past
three weeks had left him jaded and depressed, and the annoyance of
being greeted at Dumfries by Meg Cameron’s letter would not sharpen his
critical faculties. Even so he could see at a glance that the soil was
exhausted and would require long and careful nursing. In fact the only
thing to be said for Miller’s offer was that, recognizing the run-down
condition of the property, he was offering it at a low rental for the
first three years. Fifty pounds per annum for a farm of more than a
hundred acres contrasted favourably with the prices in East Lothian,
where landlords were asking as much as thirty shillings an acre. Burns
went home to Mossgiel without having made up his mind; if discussion
with the cautious Gilbert contributed to any decision it was a negative
one. Ellisland was too big a risk. He returned to Edinburgh in the
fall with his mind made up. He would renew his efforts to secure an
Excise commission and would bank the profits of his poems as a reserve
fund for the education and security of his children.
But Miller was not easily discouraged. He had evidently decided that
the poet as a tenant would be an asset to Dalswinton. Accordingly he
urged Burns to go down again and have a more critical look at the
place. A severe cold which confined him to the house enabled Burns
again to evade committing himself and not long afterwards came the
injury to his knee which laid him up for weeks and involved him in the
Clarinda affair. But meanwhile his endeavours for an Excise commission
were not prospering. Glencairn disapproved; Mrs. Dunlop disapproved;
apparently everyone who might have exerted the necessary influence
disapproved. In January Miss Nimmo sent him to a Mrs. Stewart who was
supposed to have influence with the commissioners. The interview was
not a success. Burns came away from it boiling with helpless rage. He
had been questioned like a child about his most private affairs and
Mrs. Stewart had further improved the occasion by rebuking him for
the Jacobite sentiments he had scratched on the window of the inn at
Stirling. If the quest for an Excise job was to expose him to this sort
of thing Burns was ready to throw up the whole project.
Just when the matter appeared most hopeless his chance came from an
unexpected quarter. The surgeon who had treated his injured knee was
Alexander Wood, better known to his fellow-citizens as Lang Sandy
Wood, who after a wild youth had become one of the most respectable
characters, in both senses of that word, in Edinburgh. Wood learned of
his patient’s desire and offered to do what Glencairn and the others
had refused or evaded--to bring Burns’s case directly and personally
before the Board. The result was that before he left Edinburgh Burns
found himself, ‘without any mortifying solicitation’ on his own part,
equipped with the official order for the six-weeks’ course of special
instructions which would entitle him to an Excise commission. It came
none too soon. One of the rules of the service was that no man could
enter it who was in debt, who was more than thirty years old, or who
had more than three children. Burns’s time for meeting these two latter
qualifications was getting very short indeed.
But now that he saw an open road into the Excise Burns’s mind veered
round. Farming after all was a more poetical occupation than ‘searching
auld wives’ barrels’. Miller was still urging Ellisland upon him, and
the possibility of failure there did not look so black when he knew
that if he did fail he had the Excise to turn to. He agreed to revisit
the farm. No doubt he told himself, as he told Clarinda, that he did
so only out of courtesy to Miller, knowing that the Excise must be
his lot. His judgement warned him that the farm would not do; his
emotions swayed him in its favour. In an effort to strengthen his
judgement he invited his old friend, John Tennant of Glenconner, to
join the tour of inspection. Glenconner’s mind would not be biased by
any poetic considerations. It did not occur to Burns that even the most
experienced of farmers, looking at soil different from that he was
accustomed to, could scarcely gauge its productivity rightly at the
end of February. The rule-of-thumb farming which Glenconner and most
of his contemporaries practised required the sight of growing crops
for correct judgement. Tennant looked the place over and told Burns it
was a bargain at Miller’s price. The opinion astonished the poet, but
he failed to realize that it was merely a guess less accurate than the
opinion he himself had formed on seeing the place the previous June.
Burns frequently made mistakes, but his worst ones were made when he
relied on other people’s judgement. In March he signed Miller’s lease
and committed himself to three years of struggle and discouragement
which swallowed all the capital which had not already been poured into
the bottomless morass of Mossgiel.
Legend has it that Burns was offered his choice of two farms on the
Dalswinton estate and selected Ellisland because of its more attractive
location--‘a poet’s choice and not a farmer’s’. In fact Miller offered
no choice, and in drawing up the lease employed all the usual legal
technicalities with one or two additions of his own. The rent was to be
£50 a year for the first three years and £70 thereafter, and Miller’s
zeal for improvements was to have scope even while the tenant was in
possession. The landlord reserved the right to take over the riverbank,
a twenty-yard-wide belt along the Friars Carse boundary, and two
acres of other land at his own choice to plant with trees. He agreed,
however, to put money of his own into the place. It had not even a
farmhouse when Burns signed the lease, and Miller undertook to provide
adequate buildings. The contractor’s delay in constructing these caused
further needless anxiety and actual loss to Burns.
After the die was cast all Burns’s earlier doubts about Ellisland and
his own ability to handle it returned with redoubled force. His first
move was to make sure of his Excise appointment by taking the necessary
six weeks of special instructions from the officer at Mauchline, even
though this delayed his settlement until mid-June. Inasmuch as these
six weeks included also the emotional stress of the ending of the
Clarinda romance and his acknowledgement of Jean as his wife, his
nerves were overwrought when he finally reached his farm. The prospect
there might have discouraged a more phlegmatic man. The farmhouse was
not even started, and his only shelter was a leaky and chimneyless
labourer’s hovel. The sparse growth of the crops planted by his
predecessor confirmed the exhaustion of the soil, and he was confronted
as never before with the need for executive skill. That aspect of his
nature which led him to remark that somehow he could make himself
pretty generally beloved yet never could get the art of commanding
respect told heavily against him when he had both to keep his own
labourers at work and to bully or cajole the contractor into finishing
the farmhouse at the time agreed upon. When he was not present the
farmhands lay down on the job; when he was present they found it
altogether too easy to engage him in talk while the work suffered. The
friendship he formed with Thomas Boyd, the contractor, led among other
things to an acquaintance with Thomas Telford, the great engineer,
but it did not lead to the speedy completion of his house. As late as
March, 1789, he was still pleading with Boyd to get at least the shell
of it finished. Moreover he was too sympathetic with his workmen. The
margin of profit on such a farm was too small to permit indulgence
in humanitarian sentiments, but Burns knew too much of the lives of
the lower classes to have the necessary hardness. Two letters to
the owner of the neighbouring farm with whom Burns had cooperated
in digging a drain do credit to his feelings if not to his business
capacity. The labourer who undertook the job at seventeen pence a rood
had underestimated the time. In order to give him a fair wage for his
labour Burns added three-pence a rood to the contract price for his
share and asked the neighbour to do the same--with what result is not
recorded.