A note of pride in his humble origin rings throughout the following
pages. The ploughman poet was wiser in thought than in deed, and his
life was not a happy one. But, whatever his faults, he did his best
with the one golden talent that Fate bestowed upon him. Each book that
he encountered was made to stand and deliver the message that it
carried for him. Sweethearting and good-fellowship were his bane, yet
he won much good from his practice of the art of correspondence with
sweethearts and boon companions. And although Socrates was perhaps
scarcely a name to him, he studied always to follow the Athenian's
favourite maxim, _Know thyself_; realizing, with his elder brother of
Warwickshire, that "the chiefest study of mankind is man."
From an autobiographical sketch sent to Dr. Moore.
[_To Dr. Moore_]
MAUCHLINE, August 2, 1787.
For some months past I have been rambling over the country, but I am
now confined with some lingering complaints, originating, as I take it,
in the stomach. To divert my spirits a little in this miserable fog of
ennui, I have taken a whim to give you a history of myself. My name
has made some little noise in this country; you have done me the honour
to interest yourself very warmly in my behalf; and I think a faithful
account of what character of a man I am, and how I came by that
character, may perhaps amuse you in an idle moment. I will give you an
honest narrative, though I know it will be often at my own expense; for
I assure you, sir, I have, like Solomon, whose character, excepting in
the trifling affair of wisdom, I sometimes think I resemble--I have, I
say, like him turned my eyes to behold madness and folly, and like him,
too, frequently shaken hands with their intoxicating friendship. After
you have perused these pages, should you think them trifling and
impertinent, I only beg leave to tell you that the poor author wrote
them under some twitching qualms of conscience, arising from a
suspicion that he was doing what he ought not to do; a predicament he
has more than once been in before.
I have not the most distant pretensions to assume that character which
the pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a gentleman. When at
Edinburgh last winter I got acquainted in the _Herald's_ office; and,
looking through that granary of honors, I there found almost every name
in the kingdom; but for me,
My ancient but ignoble blood
Has crept thro' scoundrels ever since the flood.
Gules, purpure, argent, etc., quite disowned me.
My father was of the north of Scotland, the son of a farmer, and was
thrown by early misfortunes on the world at large; where, after many
years' wanderings and sojournings, he picked up a pretty large quantity
of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my
little pretensions to wisdom. I have met with few who understood men,
their manners and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly
integrity, and headlong, ungovernable irascibility, are disqualifying
circumstances; consequently, I was born a very poor man's son. For the
first six or seven years of my life my father was gardener to a worthy
gentleman of small estate in the neighbourhood of Ayr. Had he
continued in that station, I must have marched off to be one of the
little underlings about a farmhouse; but it was his dearest wish and
prayer to have it in his power to keep his children under his own eye
till they could discern between good and evil; so with the assistance
of his generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his
estate.
At those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a
good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in
my disposition, and an enthusiastic, idiotic piety. I say idiotic
piety because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster
some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I
was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs,
and particles. In my infant and boyish days, too, I owe much to an old
woman who resided in the family, remarkable for her ignorance,
credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest
collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts,
fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers,
dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of
poetry; but had so strong an effect on my imagination that to this hour
in my nocturnal rambles I sometimes keep a sharp lookout in suspicious
places; and though nobody can be more sceptical than I am in such
matters, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these
idle terrors.
The earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in was "The
Vision of Mirza," and a hymn of Addison's beginning, "How are thy
servants blest, O Lord!" I particularly remember one half-stanza which
was music to my boyish ear--
For though on dreadful whirls we hung
High on the broken wave--
I met with these pieces in Mason's English Collection, one of my
schoolbooks. The first two books I ever read in private, and which
gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were "The
Life of Hannibal" and "The History of Sir William Wallace." Hannibal
gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and
down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe and wish myself tall enough
to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice
into my veins, which will boil along there till the floodgates of life
shut in eternal rest.
Polemical divinity about this time was putting the country half mad,
and I, ambitious of shining in conversation parties on Sundays, between
sermons, at funerals, etc., used a few years afterward to puzzle
Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion that I raised a hue and
cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this hour.
My vicinity to Ayr was of some advantage to me. My social disposition,
when not checked by some modifications of spirited pride, was like our
catechism definition of infinitude, without bounds or limits. I formed
several connections with other younkers, who possessed superior
advantages; the youngling actors who were busy in the rehearsal of
parts, in which they were shortly to appear on the stage of life,
where, alas! I was destined to drudge behind the scenes. It is not
commonly at this green age that our young gentry have a just sense of
the immense distance between them and their ragged playfellows. It
takes a few dashes into the world to give the young, great man that
proper, decent, unnoticing disregard for the poor, insignificant,
stupid devils, the mechanics and peasantry around him, who were,
perhaps, born in the same village. My young superiors never insulted
the clouterly appearance of my plough-boy carcase, the two extremes of
which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons.
They would give me stray volumes of books; among them, even then, I
could pick up some observations, and one, whose heart, I am sure, not
even the "Munny Begum" scenes have tainted, helped me to a little
French. Parting with these my young friends and benefactors, as they
occasionally went off for the East or West Indies, was often to me a
sore affliction; but I was soon called to more serious evils. My
father's generous master died, the farm proved a ruinous bargain; and
to clench the misfortune, we fell into the hands of a factor, who sat
for the picture I have drawn of one in my tale of "Twa Dogs." My
father was advanced in life when he married; I was the eldest of seven
children, and he, worn out by early hardships, was unfit for labour.
My father's spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There
was a freedom in his lease in two years more, and to weather these two
years, we retrenched our expenses. We lived very poorly; I was a
dexterous ploughman for my age; and the next eldest to me was a brother
(Gilbert), who could drive the plough very well, and help me to thrash
the corn. A novel-writer might, perhaps, have viewed these scenes with
some satisfaction, but so did not I; my indignation yet boils at the
recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent, threatening letters,
which used to set us all in tears.
This kind of life--the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing
moil of a galley slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little
before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme. You know our
country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the
labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching
creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me
the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the
Scottish idiom: she was a "bonnie, sweet, sonsie (engaging) lass." In
short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that
delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse
prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human
joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion I
cannot tell; you medical people talk much of infection from breathing
the same air, the touch, etc., but I never expressly said I loved her.
Indeed I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with
her when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of
her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Aeolian harp; and
particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and
fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and
thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly;
and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied
vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous 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,
excepting that he could smear sheep, and cast peats, his father living
in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself.
Thus with me began love and poetry, which at times have been my only,
and till within the last twelve months have been my highest, enjoyment.
My father struggled on till he reached the freedom in his lease, when
he entered on a larger farm, about ten miles farther in the country.
The nature of the bargain he made was such as to throw a little ready
money into his hands at the commencement of his lease, otherwise the
affair would have been impracticable. For four years we lived
comfortably here, but a difference commencing between him and his
landlord as to terms, after three years' tossing and whirling in the
vortex of litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a
jail by a consumption which, after two years' promises, kindly stepped
in, and carried him away, to where the wicked cease from troubling, and
where the weary are at rest!
It is during the time that we lived on this farm that my little story
is most eventful. I was, at the beginning of this period, perhaps the
most ungainly, awkward boy in the parish--no hermit was less acquainted
with the ways of the world. What I knew of ancient story was gathered
from Salmon's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I had
formed of modern manners, of literature, and criticism, I got from the
_Spectator_. These, with Pope's Works, some Plays of Shakespeare,
Tull, and Dickson on Agriculture, The "Pantheon," Locke's "Essay on the
Human Understanding," Stackhouse's "History of the Bible," Justice's
"British Gardener's Directory," Boyle's "Lectures," Allan Ramsay's
Works, Taylor's "Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin," "A Select
Collection of English Songs," and Hervey's "Meditations," had formed
the whole of my reading. The collection of songs was my companion, day
and night. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour,
song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true, tender, or
sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this
practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is.
In my seventeenth year, to give my manners a brush, I went to a country
dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these
meetings, and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in opposition
to his wishes. My father, as I said before, was subject to strong
passions; from that instance of disobedience in me he took a sort of
dislike to me, which, I believe, was one cause of the dissipation which
marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the
strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life;
for though the will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the
sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me
for several years afterward within the line of innocence. The great
misfortune of my life was to want an aim. I had felt early some
stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's
Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situation
entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I
could enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy or
the path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so
contracted an aperture I never could squeeze myself into it; the last I
always hated--there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus
abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for
sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of
observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm
that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life my
reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a
strength of thought, something like the rudiments of good sense; and it
will not seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I
visited, or any great wonder that always, where two or three met
together, there was I among them. But far beyond all other impulses of
my heart was a leaning toward the adorable half of humankind. My heart
was completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or
other; and, as in every other warfare in this world, my fortune was
various; sometimes I was received with favour, and sometimes I was
mortified with a repulse. At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook I feared
no competitor, and thus I set absolute want at defiance; and as I never
cared further for my labours than while I was in actual exercise, I
spent the evenings in the way after my own heart.
Another circumstance in my life which made some alteration in my mind
and manners was that I spent my nineteenth summer on a smuggling coast,
a good distance from home, at a noted school, to learn mensuration,
surveying, dialling, etc., in which I made a pretty good progress. But
I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband
trade was at that time very successful, and it sometimes happened to me
to fall with those who carried it on. Scenes of swaggering riot and
roaring dissipation were, till this time, new to me; but I was no enemy
to social life.
My reading meantime was enlarged with the very important addition of
Thomson's and Shenstone's Works. I had seen human nature in a new
phase; and I engaged several of my schoolfellows to keep up a literary
correspondence with me. This improved me in composition. I had met
with a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne's reign, and
pored over them most devoutly. I kept copies of any of my own letters
that pleased me, and a comparison between them and the composition of
most of my correspondents flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so
far that, though I had not three farthings' worth of business in the
world, yet almost every post brought me as many letters as if I had
been a broad plodding son of the day-book and ledger.
My life flowed on much in the same course till my twenty-third year.
The addition of two more authors to my library gave me great pleasure:
Sterne and Mackenzie--"Tristram Shandy" and the "Man of Feeling"--were
my bosom favourites. Poesy was still a darling walk for my mind, but
it was only indulged in according to the humour of the hour. I had
usually half a dozen or more pieces on hand; I took up one or other, as
it suited the momentary tone of the mind, and dismissed the work as it
bordered on fatigue. My passions, when once lighted up, raged like so
many devils, till they got vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my
verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet! None of the rhymes of
those days are in print, except "Winter, a Dirge," the eldest of my
printed pieces; "The Death of Poor Maillie," "John Barleycorn," and
Songs First, Second, and Third. Song Second was the ebullition of that
passion which ended the forementioned school business.
My twenty-third year was to me an important era. Partly through whim,
and partly that I wished to set about doing something in life, I joined
a flax-dresser in a neighbouring town (Irvine), to learn the trade.
This was an unlucky affair. As we were giving a welcome carousal to
the new year, the shop took fire and burned to ashes, and I was left,
like a true poet, not worth a sixpence.
I was obliged to give up this scheme, the clouds of misfortune were
gathering thick round my father's head; and, what was worst of all, he
was visibly far gone in a consumption; and to crown my distresses, a
beautiful girl, whom I adored, and who had pledged her soul to meet me
in the field of matrimony, jilted me, with peculiar circumstances of
mortification. The finishing evil that brought up the rear of this
infernal file was my constitutional melancholy being increased to such
a degree that for three months I was in a state of mind scarcely to be
envied by the hopeless wretches who have got their mittimus--depart
from me, ye cursed!
From this adventure I learned something of a town life; but the
principal thing which gave my mind a turn was a friendship I formed
with a young fellow, a very noble character, but a hapless son of
misfortune. He was the son of a simple mechanic; but a great man in
the neighbourhood taking him under his patronage, gave him a genteel
education, with a view of bettering his situation in life. The patron
dying just as he was ready to launch out into the world, the poor
fellow in despair went to sea; where, after a variety of good and ill
fortune, a little before I was acquainted with him he had been set on
shore by an American privateer, on the wild coast of Connaught,
stripped of everything. I cannot quit this poor fellow's story without
adding that he is at this time master of a large West Indiaman
belonging to the Thames.
His mind was fraught with independence, magnanimity, and every manly
virtue. I loved and admired him to a degree of enthusiasm, and of
course strove to imitate him. In some measure I succeeded; I had pride
before, but he taught it to flow in proper channels. His knowledge of
the world was vastly superior to mine, and I was all attention to
learn. . . . My reading only increased while in this town by two stray
volumes of "Pamela," and one of "Ferdinand Count Fathom," which gave me
some idea of novels. Rhyme, except some religious pieces that are in
print, I had given up; but meeting with Fergusson's Scottish Poems, I
strung anew my wildly sounding lyre with emulating vigour. When my
father died his all went among the hell-hounds that growl in the kennel
of justice; but we made a shift to collect a little money in the family
amongst us, with which to keep us together; my brother and I took a
neighbouring farm. My brother wanted my hare-brained imagination, as
well as my social and amorous madness; but in good sense, and every
sober qualification, he was far my superior.
I entered on this farm with a full resolution, "come, go to, I will be
wise!" I read farming books, I calculated crops; I attended markets;
and, in short, in spite of the devil, and the world, and the flesh, I
believe I should have been a wise man; but the first year, from
unfortunately buying bad seed, the second from a late harvest, we lost
half our crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I returned, "like the
dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the
mire."
I now began to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes. The
first of my poetic offspring that saw the light was a burlesque
lamentation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists, both of them
figuring in my "Holy Fair." I had a notion myself that the piece had
some merit; but, to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend,
who was very fond of such things, and told him that I could not guess
who was the author of it, but that I thought it pretty clever. With a
certain description of the clergy, as well as laity, it met with a roar
of applause. "Holy Willie's Prayer" next made its appearance, and
alarmed the kirk-session so much, that they held several meetings to
look over their spiritual artillery, if haply any of it might be
pointed against profane rhymers. Unluckily for me, my wanderings led
me on another side, within point-blank shot of their heaviest metal.
This is the unfortunate story that gave rise to my printed poem, "The
Lament." This was a most melancholy affair, which I cannot yet bear to
reflect on, and had very nearly given me one or two of the principal
qualifications for a place among those who have lost the chart, and
mistaken the reckoning of rationality. I gave up my part of the farm
to my brother; in truth, it was only nominally mine; and made what
little preparation was in my power for Jamaica.
But before leaving my native country forever, I resolved to publish my
poems. I weighed my productions as impartially as was in my power; I
thought they had merit; and it was a delicious idea that I should be
called a clever fellow, even though it should never reach my ears--a
poor Negro driver--or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, and
gone to the world of spirits! I can truly say that, poor and unknown
as I then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of myself and of my
works as I have at this moment, when the public has decided in their
favour. It ever was my opinion that the mistakes and blunders, both in
a rational and religious point of view, of which we see thousands daily
guilty, are owing to their ignorance of themselves. To know myself had
been all along my constant study. I weighed myself alone; I balanced
myself with others. I watched every means of information, to see how
much ground I occupied as a man and as a poet; I studied assiduously
Nature's design in my formation--where the lights and shades in my
character were intended. I was pretty confident my poems would meet
with some applause; but at the worst, the roar of the Atlantic would
deafen the voice of censure, and the novelty of West Indian scenes make
me forget neglect. I threw off six hundred copies, of which I had got
subscriptions for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly
gratified by the reception I met with from the public; and besides I
pocketed, all expenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. This sum came
very seasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself for want of
money to procure my passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas,
the price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage
in the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for
Hungry ruin had me in the wind.
I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under all the
terrors of a jail; as some ill-advised people had uncoupled the
merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the last farewell
of my few friends; my chest was on the road to Greenock; I had composed
the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia--"The Gloomy Night Is
Gathering Fast," when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine
overthrew all my schemes by opening new prospects to my poetic
ambition. The doctor belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I
had not dared to hope. His opinion, that I would meet with
encouragement in Edinburgh for a second edition, fired me so much, that
away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a single
letter of introduction. The baneful star that had so long shed its
blasting influence in my zenith for once made a revolution to the
nadir; and a kind Providence placed me under the patronage of one of
the noblest of men, the Earl of Glencairn. _Oublie moi, grand Dieu, si
jamais je l'oublie_ [Forget me, Great God, if I ever forget him!].
I need relate no further. At Edinburgh I was in a new world; I mingled
among many classes of men, but all of them new to me, and I was all
attention to "catch" the characters and "the manners living as they
rise." Whether I have profited, time will show.