prospects in the Excise brightened steadily. Friends in Edinburgh were
secretly trying to get him transferred to a more lucrative position,
but even in Dumfries things looked hopeful. At the end of December,
1794, Supervisor Findlater fell ill, and Burns took over his duties.
The work lasted three months or more, and though it is uncertain if
Burns received any extra pay for his labour he at least gained valuable
experience and competently handled his complex duties. The only adverse
criticism of his conduct related to a technical irregularity in his
final report, and this was the fault not of Burns himself but of one
of his subordinates. The passage of each year brought him higher on the
list of candidates for supervisor’s posts. Had he lived another year or
two he would automatically have been appointed even if his Edinburgh
friends had failed in their efforts to hasten the process.
The prospect of promotion was becoming very real--so real that during
the very months when he was acting as supervisor Burns devoted some of
his scanty leisure to composing a group of political ballads. Patrick
Heron of Heron--the same Heron whose bank failure had once ruined half
Ayrshire--was the Whig candidate in a by-election at Kirkcudbright.
In return for the support of Burns’s pen Heron asked if he could do
anything for the poet. Burns’s reply showed his mind at its coldest
level of realism. Nothing could be done, he said, for two or three
years, until he reached the head of the supervisors’ list. Then a
political friend could be of service in getting him appointed in some
agreeable part of the kingdom and of still more service in hastening
his next step in rank. Collectorships went by favour, and the time he
must spend in the drudgery of a supervisorship would therefore depend
on the amount of influence his friends could exert. The letter is
graphic proof of Burns’s open-eyed acceptance of the system in which he
worked; it is also proof of his irrepressible lack of discretion. From
the viewpoint of mere self-interest he would have done better to hold
aloof from all political contests and, when the time came, to base his
appeal for influence upon his standing as a poet instead of identifying
himself with any party. But such calm calculation was not in his nature.
In any case his hopes were vain. His disease was gaining on him; he
experienced sharp twinges of pain which he and his doctors called
rheumatism, but which were probably angina pectoris. In June and
again in December, 1795, he had serious illnesses which left him weak
and shaken. In the face of his increasing weakness he had taken on
additional labour by enlisting in a volunteer company organized in
Dumfries in the early spring. The manual of arms and frequent drills
were dangerous medicine for a diseased heart, and to this physical
labour Burns added active participation in all the business affairs of
the corps. His final breakdown could not in any circumstances have been
long delayed, but the Dumfries Volunteers undoubtedly hastened it.
The winter of 1795-6 was a time of famine. Crops had been bad; trade
was dislocated by the war. Nearly one-fourth of the inhabitants of
Edinburgh were being fed by charity, and flour was so scarce that even
those who could afford it were asked to ration themselves to one loaf
of bread per capita a week. Conditions in the smaller towns were as
bad or worse; there were serious food riots in Dumfries in February
and March. With his health steadily declining Burns was exposed to
constant worry for the welfare of his family. Excise officers who were
unable over long periods to perform their duties because of illness
were reduced to half-pay, and as matters stood in the spring of 1796
half-pay would have meant almost starvation for his children. That
things did not come to this pass for Burns was due to the generosity
of Adam Stobbie, who handled his work for him and refused compensation
for the service. This relieved some of his immediate anxiety, but did
little to answer the main question of what would become of Jean and the
children if he died.
The problem of livelihood, never long absent from his mind, occupied
it during his last weeks almost to the exclusion of other thoughts.
The only prescriptions the doctors could offer in his illness involved
expenditures he could not afford, and his enlistment in the Volunteers
now returned to plague him. The tailor who had made his uniform began
to dun for payment, and to the poet’s fevered imagination it seemed
that his life was going to close as his father’s had, under the shadow
of a debtors’ prison. He spent some of his last days of consciousness
in writing frantic letters begging the friends to whom he had lent
money to repay their loans and asking others like George Thomson and
James Burness to advance him money. Thomson was the only one who gave
grudgingly. The others willingly and promptly sent what he asked, but
too late to lift the cloud from his dying mind. His last articulate
words were an imprecation against the tailor who had threatened him,
and he died without the comfort of knowing that his death would awaken
the generosity he had never experienced in his life, and that the
admirers of his poetry would make it possible for Jean to keep her home
together and for his children to be decently educated and launched on
respectable careers.
VI
SONG
Burns never wrote a ‘Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, and left
only a few fragments of his projected satire on ‘The Poet’s Progress’.
Yet his letters and journals, as well as the poems themselves, so
definitely describe his moods and methods of composition that his
poetic psychology can be studied almost as fully as Wordsworth’s own.
Conscious pleasure in poetry read or heard first came to him in boyhood
through one of Addison’s hymns; mingled with martial and patriotic
sentiment he found it also in ‘The History of Sir William Wallace’ and
the Life of Hannibal. This latter, he said, ‘gave my young ideas such
a turn that I used to strut in raptures up & down after the recruiting
drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier, while
the story of Wallace poured a Scotish prejudice in my veins which will
boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.’
But this, like the similar thrills from all the odds and ends of
English poetry and Scottish song which came his way, was commonplace
boyish emotion. The need and desire to write poetry of his own did
not awaken until his adolescent blood was warmed, in his ‘fifteenth
autumn’, by the first consciousness of sexual attraction in the company
of Nelly Kilpatrick.
‘I never expressly told her that I loved her.--Indeed I did not well
know myself, why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when
returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice
made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly,
why my pulse beat such a furious ratann when I looked and fingered
over her hand, to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.--Among
her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly, and ’twas
her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in
rhyme.--I was not so presumtive as to imagine that I could make verses
like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my
girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small country
laird’s son, on one of his father’s maids, with whom he was in love;
and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he, for ... he
had no more Scholarcraft than I had.’
‘Thus’, Burns summed up, with a juxtaposition of ideas never far
separated in his mind, ‘with me began Love and Poesy.’ In all respects
save one the episode was the commonest experience of calf-love. But
that one difference was decisive. When a girl roused him to lyric
fervour, Burns did not sit down and merely string his emotions together
in rime. Another element went to make the song; an element that
ultimately would mean more, poetically, to Burns than any girl--namely,
a tune. His mind did not work from emotion directly to words; it worked
from emotion to music, and the music brought the words which expressed
its mood. Herein Burns was almost unique among modern poets. Fully
to appreciate his lyrics one must hear them sung to the airs which
evoked them. To read many of them in bare print is like reading the
libretto of an opera. Even in his satires and epistles the process of
composition was usually the same, though another man’s poem, instead
of music, fired the train. Acquaintance with his models is almost as
illuminating as acquaintance with his tunes.
His first effort at song-writing led to a conscious study of the poet’s
craft. The elaborate criticism appended to ‘Handsome Nell’ when Burns
copied the poem into his Commonplace Book is too obviously a bravura
piece to merit consideration; more noteworthy is his account of how he
studied his collection of English songs: ‘I pored over them, verse by
verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation and
fustian.--I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft such as
it is.’ But these were _English_ songs, and their effect on his early
work shows mainly in such things as ‘My father was a farmer’ and ‘Man
was made to mourn’, which latter in the Commonplace Book is entitled,
‘A Song: Tune, Peggy Bawn’. Even his most doleful lines came to him in
music.
But lugubrious notes were not the only ones. It was as inevitable
that a young Scot should try his hand at metrical paraphrases of the
Psalms as that a young Etonian of the same century should paraphrase
Horace. The results in both cases are equally negligible. Youth has
to repeat the stale patterns of its predecessors before it can find
its own. It was much more important that ‘I murder hate by field or
flood’ was written in the same way. This is an epigrammatic song in the
Restoration manner, and as English in language as in style. But it was
written to a Scottish air, ‘Gillicrankie’. The innate Scottish culture
of the poet was beginning, as early as 1781, to assimilate and adapt
the alien materials of Restoration England.
Though Burns failed to act on Richard Brown’s suggestion that he send
some of his early verses to a magazine, the idea stuck. The yeasty
stirrings of a still immature mind which had led him in 1780 to plague
his friends with pompous discourses on Pride and Courage were slowly
giving place to more personal thinking on topics which he better
understood. His customary chronological vagueness in referring to his
early manhood makes it uncertain whether he began his Commonplace
Book before he discovered the poems of Robert Fergusson, or after.
The internal evidence indicates the former. So does the elaborate
title-page:
‘Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, &c., by Robt. Burness;
a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping
it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty,
and unbounded good-will to every creature--rational or irrational.
As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at
a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his
unpolished, rustic way of life; but, as I believe they are really
_his own_, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of
human-nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the
pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety, Grief, with the like cares and
passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life,
operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all the Species.
“There are numbers in the world who do not want sense to make a
figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities, to put them
upon recording their observations, and allowing them the same
importance which they do to those which appear in print.”--Shenstone.
“Pleasing when youth is long expir’d to trace,
The forms our pencil, or our pen design’d.
Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face!
Such the soft image of our youthful mind.”
Ibidem.’
Burns was already conscious of something more in himself than there was
in the average young peasant; as an escape from worries over his own
health and the family’s future he was undertaking to leave a record of
himself to edify some hypothetical future reader. Whatever tinge of
humility there might be on his title-page was, like the pretence at
third-person reporting, assumed. He meant to prove that a peasant youth
shared the feelings of his betters and could rime and moralize to as
good effect as they. But the title-page, the quotations from Shenstone,
and the opening paragraph about Love all announce a programme he soon
abandoned. When he began the book he was still thinking in the terms
of his first letters about Pride and Courage; before he ended it he was
thinking in poetry.
Though he might continue to assert that he rimed for fun, the fact was
that from the day in April, 1783, when he commenced the Commonplace
Book he was composing for publication, though not necessarily for
print. His earliest verses were either the expression of a personal
emotion, social _jeux d’esprit_, or conventional exercises in
versification, with no purpose beyond the momentary and personal one;
the ‘Observations, Scraps of Song, &c.’, were to be his legacy to the
world. Not by chance did the Commonplace Book and its successor survive
the general destruction of his private papers when he supposed himself
on the eve of flight to Jamaica. Even though by that time the best of
his verse had escaped the hazard of manuscript and was safely enshrined
in the good black print of the Kilmarnock volume, he could not bring
himself to destroy these records. It was well that he saved them. The
Commonplace Book remains the sole record of what Burns was doing,
intellectually and poetically, between April, 1783, and October, 1785.
Commencing with self-conscious commentaries on life and on his own
first efforts at writing, it reveals before its close his steady growth
in artistic competence.
Not that it resembles the notebooks of Keats and Shelley, with their
evidence of how poems grow in the poet’s mind. Burns’s poems stayed
in his mind until they were mature. His poverty and his method of
composing to music combined to prevent his committing half-formed ideas
to paper. Paper was scarce and expensive; often in his early days he
failed to write down his poems even when they were complete. Sometimes
he forgot them entirely; sometimes he managed to reconstruct them long
afterwards, as he did when he recalled ‘The Mauchline Wedding’ for
Mrs. Dunlop’s amusement. One of the few poems composed on paper is the
disastrous ‘Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair’, which Burns
drafted in his Border journal. Here he was working with an English
verse-form for which no melody existed. It took him three different
sittings painfully to wring out the first seven stanzas. Again in
1791 he reported that he had ‘these several months been hammering at
an Elegy’ on Miss Burnet of Monboddo, but found elegy ‘so exhausted a
subject that any new idea on the business is not to be expected’; the
original manuscript of the ‘Lament for James Earl of Glencairn’ reveals
similar struggles. When no tune sang itself in his head, composition
was labour and the results were wooden. The ‘Lament’, with a more lyric
stanza and with stronger personal feeling at its root, came nearer
than the others to success, but even it cannot be ranked among the
great elegies. Declining Cunningham’s suggestion of a theme, he once
said, ‘I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish,
rather than from the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose.’ In
commemorating Lord Glencairn, wish and impulse combined, yet even here
he did not wholly succeed because the tune was lacking.
Poetic expression with Burns was not, as with Wordsworth, the fruit
of emotion recollected in tranquillity; it was the fruit of emotion
expressing itself to music. Though as he grew older the emotion no
longer needed to be so strongly personal as when he wrote his earliest
songs, the dependence on music became correspondingly greater. How he
composed in his later years he told George Thomson in the autumn of
1793:
‘Until I am compleat master of a tune, in my own singing (such as
it is) I never can compose for it.--My way is: I consider the
poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical
expression; then chuse my theme; begin one stanza; when that is
composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the
business, I walk out, sit down now & then, look out for objects in
Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations
of my fancy & workings of my bosom; humming every now & then the air
with the verses I have framed: when I feel my Muse beginning to jade,
I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, & there commit my
effusions to paper; swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my
elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as
my pen goes on.--
Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way.--What damn’d
Egotism!’
Though it would probably be impossible to overstress Robert Fergusson’s
influence on Burns’s development, the elder poet’s primary service was
to clarify and confirm ideas already present but as yet inarticulate
in Burns’s mind. He knew what he liked, and what his own poetic
impulses were; the discovery of Fergusson enabled him to define
both his method and his objective. To realize how much he matured
intellectually between the beginning of the Commonplace Book in 1783
and its conclusion in 1785, one need merely read the strutting,
self-conscious, and essentially empty criticism of ‘expletive phrases’
of ‘too serious sentiment’, and ‘flimsy strain’ which he appended to
‘Handsome Nell’, or the pseudo-devotional passage about the grand end
of human life being ‘to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to
whom we owe life’. These things of 1783 are juvenilia. The following,
written in September, 1785, is adult:
‘There is a certain irregularity in the Old Scotch Songs, a
redundancy of syllables with respect to that exactness of accent
and measure that the English Poetry requires, but which glides in,
most melodiously with the respective tunes to which they are set. For
instance, the fine old song of “The Mill Mill O,” to give it a plain
prosaic reading, it halts prodigiously out of measure; on the other
hand, the song set to the same tune in Bremner’s collection of Scotch
Songs which begins “To Fanny fair could I impart,” &c., it is most
exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic,
one above the biasses of prejudice, but a thorough Judge of Nature,
how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely
methodical, compared with the wild-warbling cadence, the heart-moving
melody of the first. This particularly is the case with all those
airs which end with a hypermetrical syllable. There is a degree of
wild irregularity in many of the compositions and fragments which
are daily sung to them by my compeers, the common people--a certain
happy arrangement of Old Scotch syllables, and yet, very frequently,
nothing, not even _like_ rhyme, or sameness of jingle at the ends of
the lines. This has made me sometimes imagine that perhaps, it might
be possible for a Scotch Poet, with a nice, judicious ear, to set
compositions to many of our most favorite airs ... independent of
rhyme altogether....’
With nothing except mother-wit and a sure ear to guide him, Burns
had reached conclusions regarding poetic rhythm at complete variance
with the critical theories of his century and beyond the practice
of even nineteenth-century orthodoxy. He had recognized that the
real charm of folk-poetry lies in the fact that it is musical rather
than regular. In an age when the essence of poetry was thought to
abide in the accurately counted syllables of the heroic couplet such
an opinion would have seemed not merely heresy but sheer insanity.
Compared with it, Coleridge’s supposed innovation of hypermetrical
syllables in _Christabel_ is timid conventionality. Blake alone among
Burns’s contemporaries had bolder theories of rhythm, and his work,
which the Scotsman never saw, had to wait more than half a century
for recognition. Burns later expended much time and ink in trying to
persuade George Thomson that a song could be poetry even if all its
lines did not count up the same number of syllables, but he was never
optimistic enough to offer that silly body a lyric which dispensed with
rime.
So, too, in regard to the physiology and psychology of composition,
Burns, before he ever published a line, had reached closer to
fundamentals than an academician like Hugh Blair could ever go. Like
Milton he had recognized from his own experience that there is in many
poets a seasonal rhythm of creativeness. In himself it usually began
in August, and continued for several months. That month, he said in
his autobiography, was always a carnival in his bosom; in 1793 he told
Thomson, ‘Autumn is my propitious season. I make more verses in it,
than all the year else,’ and at the beginning of the next summer he
repeated the assertion: ‘Now, & for six or seven months _I shall be
quite in song_.’ In other words, it took all the scanty sunshine of the
Scottish summer to bring him physically to that level of well-being at
which creation was possible.
The psychology of composition, moreover, which he explained in prose
in 1793 he had defined in poetry in the epistle to William Simpson
of Ochiltree, composed in May, 1785, and published in the Kilmarnock
volume. It is surprisingly like A. E. Housman’s, who recorded that some
of his best poems came to him spontaneously while walking on Hampstead
Heath and thinking of nothing in particular, after drinking a pint of
beer at luncheon. Burns’s formula is precisely similar:
The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himself he learn’d to wander
Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
An’ no think lang.
In these circumstances, when his emotional pressure was high enough,
lines and stanzas would come unsought to his mind, and it was to
this experience he referred when he repeatedly called himself ‘a
Bard of Nature’s making’. Burns knew as well as Housman did that
this spontaneous birth was only the beginning and not the end of
composition. Gilbert reported the process without realizing its
significance:
‘Robert often composed without any regular plan. When anything made
a strong impression on his mind, so as to rouse it to any poetic
exertion, he would give way to the impulse, and embody the thought
in rhyme. If he hit on two or three stanzas to please him, he would
then think of proper introductory, connecting, and concluding
stanzas; hence the middle of a poem was often first produced.’
It suited with the role of inspired ploughman which Burns assumed among
the Edinburgh gentry to give the impression that the finished poem
also was spontaneous, but he knew better. His poetry was often born
under the open sky, with the physical rhythm of his farm-work supplying
the muscular accompaniment he later sought in strolls on the banks
of Nith, but it was matured and revised by concentrated study of the
implications of his theme. As the piper has to walk his measure, so
Burns’s body moved to the rhythm of the tune which was in his mind,
and the rhythm brought the words which expressed his mood.