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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Burns, by Gabriel Setoun
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Robert Burns
+       Famous Scots Series
+
+Author: Gabriel Setoun
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2009 [EBook #30721]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT BURNS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT BURNS
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+ROBERT
+BURNS
+
+BY
+GABRIEL
+SETOUN
+
+FAMOUS
+.SCOTS.
+.SERIES.
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+OLIPHANT ANDERSON
+& FERRIER . EDINBURGH
+AND LONDON
+
+]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and
+the printing from the press of Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh.
+
+    _June 1896._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+BIRTH AND EDUCATION                                                    7
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LOCHLEA AND MOSSGIEL                                                  25
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE SERIES OF SATIRES                                                 40
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE KILMARNOCK EDITION                                                56
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE EDINBURGH EDITION                                                 73
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BURNS'S TOURS                                                         92
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ELLISLAND                                                            111
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+DUMFRIES                                                             128
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE                                                 148
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT BURNS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+BIRTH AND EDUCATION
+
+
+Of the many biographies of Robert Burns that have been written, most of
+them laboriously and carefully, perhaps not one gives so luminous and
+vivid a portrait, so lifelike and vigorous an impression of the
+personality of the poet and the man, as the picture the author has given
+of himself in his own writings. Burns's poems from first to last are,
+almost without exception, the literary embodiment of his feelings at a
+particular moment. He is for ever revealing himself to the reader, even
+in poems that might with propriety be said to be purely objective. His
+writings in a greater degree than the writings of any other author are
+the direct expression of his own experiences; and in his poems and songs
+he is so invariably true to himself, so dominated by the mood of the
+moment, that every one of them gives us some glimpse into the heart and
+soul of the writer. In his letters he is rarely so happy; frequently he
+is writing up to certain models, and ceases to be natural. Consequently
+we often miss in them the character and spirituality that is never
+absent from his poetry. But his poems and songs, chronologically
+arranged, might make in themselves, and without the aid of any running
+commentary, a tolerably complete biography. Reading them, we note the
+development of his character and the growth of his powers as a poet; we
+can see at any particular time his attitude towards the world, and the
+world's attitude towards him; we have, in fine, a picture of the man in
+his relations to his fellow-man and in relation to circumstances, and
+may learn if we will what mark he made on the society of his time, and
+what effect that society had on him. And that surely is an important
+essential of perfect biography.
+
+But otherwise the story of Burns's life has been told with such
+minuteness of detail, that the internal evidence of his poetry would
+seem only to be called in to verify or correct the verdict of tradition
+and the garbled gossip of those wise after the fact of his fame. It is
+so easy after a man has compelled the attention of the world to fill up
+the empty years of his life when he was all unknown to fame, with
+illustrative anecdotes and almost forgotten incidents, revealed and
+coloured by the light of after events! This is a penalty of genius, and
+it is sometimes called fame, as if fame were a gift given of the world
+out of a boundless and unintelligent curiosity, and not the life-record
+of work achieved. It is easier to collect ana and to make them into the
+patchwork pattern of a life than to read the character of the man in his
+writings; and patchwork, of necessity, has more of colour than the
+homespun web of a peasant-poet.
+
+Burns has suffered sorely at the hands of the anecdote-monger. One great
+feature of his poems is their perfect sincerity. He pours out his soul
+in song; tells the tale of his loves, his joys and sorrows, of his
+faults and failings, and the awful pangs of remorse. And if a man be
+candid and sincere, he will be taken at his word when he makes the world
+his confessional, and calls himself a sinner. There is pleasure to small
+minds in discovering that the gods are only clay; that they who are
+guides and leaders are men of like passions with themselves, subject to
+the same temptations, and as liable to fall. This is the consolation of
+mediocrity in the presence of genius; and if from the housetops the poet
+proclaims his shortcomings, the world will hear him gladly and believe;
+his faults will be remembered, and his genius forgiven. What more easy
+than to bear out his testimony with the weight of collateral evidence,
+and the charitable anecdotage of acquaintances who knew him not?
+Information that is vile and valueless may ever be had for the seeking;
+and it needs only to be whispered about for a season to find its way
+ultimately into print, and to flourish.
+
+It might naturally be expected at this time of day that all that is
+merely mythical and traditional might have been sifted from what is
+accredited and attested fact, that the chaff might have been winnowed
+from the grain in the life of Burns. In some of the most
+recently-published biographies this has been most carefully and
+conscientiously done; but through so many years wild and improbable
+stories had been allowed to thrive and to go unchallenged, that fiction
+has come to take the colour and character of fact, and to pass into
+history. 'The general impression of the place,' that unfortunate phrase
+on which the late George Gilfillan based an unpardonable attack on the
+character of the poet, has grown by slow degrees, and gained credence by
+the lapse of time, till it is accepted as the general impression of the
+country. Those who would speak of the poet Robert Burns are expected to
+speak apologetically, and to point a moral from the story of a wasted
+life. For that has become a convention, and convention is always
+respectable. But after all is said and done, the devil's advocate makes
+a wretched biographer. It seems strange and unaccountable that men
+should dare to become apologists for one who has sung himself into the
+heart and conscience of his country, and taken the ear of the world. Yet
+there have been apologists even for the poetry of Burns. We are told,
+wofully, that he wrote only short poems and songs; was content with
+occasional pieces; did not achieve any long and sustained effort--to be
+preserved, it is to be expected, in a folio edition, and assigned a
+fitting place among other musty and hide-bound immortals on the shelves
+of libraries under lock and key. As well might we seek to apologise for
+the fields and meadows, in so far as they bring forth neither corn nor
+potatoes, but only grasses and flowers, to dance to the piping of the
+wind, and nod in the sunshine of summer.
+
+It is a healthier sign, however, that the more recent biographers of
+Burns snap their fingers in the face of convention, and, looking to the
+legacy he has left the world, refuse to sit in sackcloth and ashes round
+his grave, either in the character of moralising mourners or charitable
+mutes. Whatever has to be said against them nowadays, the 'cant of
+concealment'--to adopt another of Gilfillan's phrases--is not to be laid
+to their charge. Rather have they rushed to the other extreme, and in
+their eagerness to do justice to the memory of the poet, led the reader
+astray in a wilderness of unnecessary detail. So much is now known of
+Burns, so many minute and unimportant details of his life and the lives
+of others have been unearthed, that the poet is, so to speak, buried in
+biography; the character and the personality of the man lost in the
+voluminous testimony of many witnesses. Reading, we note the care and
+conscientiousness of the writer; we have but a confused and blurred
+impression of the poet. Although a century has passed since his death,
+we do not yet see the events of Burns's life in proper perspective.
+Things trifling in themselves, and of little bearing on his character,
+have been preserved, and are still recorded with painful elaboration;
+while the sidelights from friends, companions, and acquaintances, male
+and female, are many and bewildering.
+
+Would it not be possible out of this mass of material to tell the story
+of Robert Burns's life simply and clearly, neither wandering away into
+the family histories and genealogies of a crowd of uninteresting
+contemporaries, nor wasting time in elaborating inconsequential trifles?
+What is wanted is a picture of the man as he was, and an understanding
+of all that tended to make him the name and the power he is in the world
+to-day.
+
+William Burness, the father of the poet, was a native of
+Kincardineshire, and 'was thrown by early misfortunes on the world at
+large.' After many years' wanderings, he at last settled in Ayrshire,
+where he worked at first as a gardener before taking a lease of some
+seven acres of land near the Bridge of Doon, and beginning business as
+a nurseryman. It was to a clay cottage which he built on this land that
+he brought his wife, Agnes Broun, in December 1757; and here the poet
+was born in 1759. The date of his birth is not likely to be forgotten.
+
+    'Our monarch's hindmost year but ane
+    Was five-and-twenty days begun,
+    'Twas then a blast o' Jan'war' win'
+        Blew hansel in on Robin.'
+
+To his father Burns owed much; and if there be anything in heredity in
+the matter of genius, it was from him that he inherited his marvellous
+mental powers. His mother is spoken of as a shrewd and sagacious woman,
+with education enough to enable her to read her Bible, but unable to
+write her own name. She had a great love for old ballads, and Robert as
+a boy must often have listened to her chanting the quaint old songs with
+which her retentive memory was stored. The poet resembled his mother in
+feature, although he had the swarthy complexion of his father. Attempts
+have been made now and again to trace his ancestry on the father's side,
+and to give to the world a kind of genealogy of genius. Writers have
+demonstrated to their own satisfaction that it was perfectly natural
+that Burns should have been the man he was. But the other children of
+William Burness were not great poets. It has even been discovered that
+his genius was Celtic, whatever that may mean! Excursions and
+speculations of this kind are vain and unprofitable, hardly more
+reputable than the profanities of the Dumfries craniologists who, in
+1834, in the early hours of April 1st,--a day well chosen,--desecrated
+the poet's dust. They fingered his skull, 'applied their compasses to
+it, and satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to write
+_Tam o' Shanter_, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, and _To Mary in
+Heaven_.' Let us take the poet as he comes to us, a gift of the gods,
+and be thankful. As La Bruyere puts it, 'Ces hommes n'ont ni ancetres ni
+posterites; ils forment eux seuls toute une descendance.'
+
+What Burns owed particularly to his father he has told us himself both
+in prose and verse. The exquisite and beautiful picture of the father
+and his family at their evening devotions is taken from life; and
+William Burness is the sire who
+
+          'turns o'er with patriarchal grace
+    The big ha'-bible ance his father's pride';
+
+and in his fragment of autobiography the poet remarks: 'My father picked
+up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am
+indebted for most of my pretensions to wisdom. I have met with few men
+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.... 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, he ventured on
+a small farm in that gentleman's estate.'
+
+This estimate of William Burness is endorsed and amplified by Mr.
+Murdoch, who had been engaged by him to teach his children, and knew him
+intimately.
+
+'I myself,' he says, 'have always considered William Burness as by far
+the best of the human race that ever I had the pleasure of being
+acquainted with. He was an excellent husband; a tender and affectionate
+father. He had the art of gaining the esteem and goodwill of those that
+were labourers under him. He carefully practised every known duty, and
+avoided everything that was criminal; or, in the apostle's words,
+_Herein did he exercise himself in living a life void of offence towards
+God and man_.'
+
+Even in his manner of speech he was different from men in his own walk
+in life. 'He spoke the English language with more propriety (both with
+respect to diction and pronunciation) than any man I ever knew with no
+greater advantages.'
+
+Truly was Burns blessed in his parents, especially in his father.
+Naturally such a father wished his children to have the best education
+his means could afford. It may be that he saw even in the infancy of his
+firstborn the promise of intellectual greatness. Certain it is he
+laboured, as few fathers even in Scotland have done, to have his
+children grow up intelligent, thoughtful, and virtuous men and women.
+
+Robert Burns's first school was at Alloway Mill, about a mile from home,
+whither he was sent when in his sixth year. He had not been long there,
+however, when the father combined with a few of his neighbours to
+establish a teacher in their own neighbourhood. That teacher was Mr.
+Murdoch, a young man at that time in his nineteenth year.
+
+This is an important period in the poet's life, although he himself in
+his autobiography only briefly touches on his schooling under Murdoch.
+He has more to say of what he owed to an old maid of his mother's,
+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, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This
+cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; 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 in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of
+philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.'
+
+It ought not to be forgotten that Burns had a better education than most
+lads of his time. Even in the present day many in better positions have
+not the advantages that Robert and Gilbert Burns had, the sons of such a
+father as William Burness, and under such an earnest and thoughtful
+teacher as Mr. Murdoch. It is important to notice this, because Burns is
+too often regarded merely as a _lusus naturae_; a being gifted with song,
+and endowed by nature with understanding from his birth. We hear too
+much of the _ploughman_ poet. His genius and natural abilities are
+unquestioned and unquestionable; but there is more than mere natural
+genius in his writings. They are the work of a man of no mean education,
+and bear the stamp--however spontaneously his songs sing themselves in
+our ears--of culture and study. In a letter to Dr. Moore several years
+later than now, Burns himself declared against the popular view. 'I have
+not a doubt but the knack, the aptitude to learn the Muses' trade is a
+gift bestowed by Him who forms the secret bias of the soul; but I as
+firmly believe that _excellence_ in the profession is the fruit of
+industry, attention, labour, and pains. At least I am resolved to try my
+doctrine by the test of experience.' There is a class of people,
+however, to whom this will sound heretical, forbidding them, as it were,
+the right to babble with grovelling familiarity of Rab, Rob, Robbie,
+Scotia's Bard, and the Ploughman Poet; and insisting on his name being
+spoken with conscious pride of utterance, Robert Burns, Poet.
+
+Gilbert Burns, writing to Dr. Currie of the school-days under Mr.
+Murdoch, says: 'We learnt to read English tolerably well, and to write a
+little. He taught us, too, the English Grammar. I was too young to
+profit much by his lessons in grammar, but Robert made some proficiency
+in it--a circumstance of considerable weight in the unfolding of his
+genius and character, as he soon became remarkable for the fluency and
+correctness of his expression, and read the few books that came in his
+way with much pleasure and improvement; for even then he was a reader
+when he could get a book.'
+
+After the family removed to Mount Oliphant, the brothers attended Mr.
+Murdoch's school for two years longer, until Mr. Murdoch was appointed
+to a better situation, and the little school was broken up. Thereafter
+the father looked after the education of his boys himself, not only
+helping them with their reading at home after the labours of the day,
+but 'conversing familiarly with them on all subjects, as if they had
+been men, and being at great pains, as they accompanied him on the
+labours of the farm, to lead conversation to such subjects as might tend
+to increase their knowledge or confirm them in virtuous habits.' Among
+the books he borrowed or bought for them at that period were Salmon's
+_Geographical Grammar_, Derham's _Physico-Theology_, Ray's _Wisdom of
+God in the Works of Creation_, and Stackhouse's _History of the Bible_.
+It was about this time, too, that Robert became possessed of _The
+Complete Letter-Writer_, a book which Gilbert declared was to Robert of
+the greatest consequence, since it inspired him with a great desire to
+excel in letter-writing, and furnished him with models by some of the
+first writers in our language. Perhaps this book was a great gain. It is
+questionable. What would Robert Burns's letters have been had he never
+seen a Complete Letter-Writer, and never read 'those models by some of
+the first writers in our language'? Easier and more natural, we are of
+opinion; and he might have written fewer. Those in the Complete
+Letter-Writer style we could easily have spared. His teacher, Mr.
+Murdoch, furnishes some excellent examples of the stilted epistolary
+style that was then fashionable.
+
+'But now the plains of Mount Oliphant began to whiten, and Robert was
+summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of
+Calypso, and, armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising himself
+in the fields of Ceres.' Though Robert Burns never perpetrated anything
+like this, his models were not without their pernicious effect on his
+prose compositions.
+
+When Robert was about fourteen years old, he and Gilbert were sent for a
+time, week about, to a school at Dalrymple, and the year following
+Robert was sent to Ayr to revise his English grammar under Mr. Murdoch.
+While there he began the study of French, bringing with him, when he
+returned home, a French Dictionary and Grammar and Fenelon's
+_Telemaque_. In a little while he could read and understand any French
+author in prose. He also gave some time to Latin; but finding it dry and
+uninteresting work, he soon gave it up. Still he must have picked up a
+little of that language, and we know that he returned to the rudiments
+frequently, although 'the Latin seldom predominated, a day or two at a
+time, or a week at most.' Under the heading of general reading might be
+mentioned _The Life of Hannibal_, _The Life of Wallace_, _The
+Spectator_, Pope's _Homer_, Locke's _Essay on the Human Understanding_,
+_Allan Ramsay's Works_, and several _Plays of Shakspeare_. All this is
+worth noting, even at some length, because it shows how Burns was being
+educated, and what books went to form and improve his literary taste.
+
+Yet when we consider the circumstances of the family we see that there
+was not much time for study. The work on the farm allowed Burns little
+leisure, but every spare moment would seem to have been given to
+reading. Father and sons, we are told by one who afterwards knew the
+family at Lochlea, used to sit at their meals with books in their hands;
+and the poet says that one book in particular, _A Select Collection of
+English Songs_, was his _vade mecum_. He pored over them, driving his
+cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully
+noting the true, tender, or sublime from affectation or fustian. 'I am
+convinced,' he adds, 'I owe to this practice much of my critic craft,
+such as it is.'
+
+The years of their stay at Mount Oliphant were years of unending toil
+and of poverty bravely borne. The whole period was a long fight against
+adverse circumstances. Looking back on his life at this time, Burns
+speaks of it as 'the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil
+of a galley slave'; and we can well believe that this is no exaggerated
+statement. His brother Gilbert is even more emphatic. 'Mount Oliphant,'
+he says, 'is almost the poorest soil I know of in a state of
+cultivation.... My father, in consequence of this, soon came into
+difficulties, which were increased by the loss of several of his cattle
+by accident and disease. To the buffetings of misfortune we could only
+oppose hard labour and the most rigid economy. We lived very sparingly.
+For several years butcher's meat was a stranger in the house, while all
+the members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their
+strength, and rather beyond it, in the labours of the farm. My brother,
+at the age of thirteen, assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and at
+fifteen was the principal labourer on the farm; for we had no hired
+servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt at our tender years
+under these straits and difficulties was very great. To think of our
+father growing old (for he was now above fifty), broken down with the
+long-continued fatigues of his life, with a wife and five other
+children, and in a declining state of circumstances, these reflections
+produced in my brother's mind and mine sensations of the deepest
+distress. I doubt not but the hard labour and sorrow of this period of
+his life was in a great measure the cause of that depression of spirits
+with which Robert was so often afflicted through his whole life
+afterwards. At this time he was almost constantly afflicted in the
+evenings with a dull headache, which at a future period of his life was
+exchanged for a palpitation of the heart and a threatening of fainting
+and suffocation in his bed in the night-time.'
+
+This, we doubt not, is a true picture--melancholy, yet beautiful. But
+not only did this increasing toil and worry to make both ends meet,
+injure the bodily health of the poet, but it did harm to him in other
+ways. It affected, to a certain extent, his moral nature. Those bursts
+of bitterness which we find now and again in his poems, and more
+frequently in his letters, are assuredly the natural outcome of these
+unsocial and laborious years. Burns was a man of sturdy independence;
+too often this independence became aggressive. He was a man of
+marvellous keenness of perception; too frequently did this manifest
+itself in a sulky suspicion, a harshness of judgment, and a bitterness
+of speech. We say this in no spirit of fault-finding, but merely point
+it out as a natural consequence of a wretched and leisureless existence.
+This was the education of circumstances--hard enough in Burns's case;
+and if it developed in him certain sterling qualities, gave him an
+insight into and a sympathy with the lives of his struggling fellows, it
+at the same time warped, to a certain extent, his moral nature.
+
+What was his outlook on the world at this time? He measured himself with
+those he met, we may be sure, for Burns certainly (as he says of his
+father) 'understood men, their manners and their ways,' as it is given
+to very few to be able to do. Of the ploughmen, farmers, lairds, or
+factors, he saw round about him there was none to compare with him in
+natural ability, few his equal in field-work. 'At the plough, scythe, or
+reap-hook,' he remarks, 'I feared no competitor.' Yet, conscious of easy
+superiority, he saw himself a drudge, almost a slave, while those whom
+nature had not blessed with brains were gifted with a goodly share of
+this world's wealth.
+
+    It's hardly in a body's power
+    To keep at times frae being sour,
+    To see how things are shar'd;
+    How best o' chiels are whiles in want,
+    While coofs on countless thousands rant,
+    An' ken na how to wair 't.'
+
+His father, his brother, and himself--all the members of the family
+indeed--toiled unceasingly, yet were unable to better their position.
+Matters, indeed, got worse, and worst of all when their landlord died,
+and they were left to the tender mercies of a factor. The name of this
+man we do not know, nor need we seek to know it. We know the man
+himself, and he will live for ever a type of tyrannous, insolent
+insignificance.
+
+    'I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day,
+    An' mony a time my heart's been wae,
+    Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash,
+    How they maun thole a factor's snash:
+    He'll stamp an' threaten, curse an swear,
+    He'll apprehend them, poind their gear:
+    While they maun stan', wi' aspect humble,
+    An' hear it a', an' fear an' tremble.'
+
+Is it to be wondered at that Burns's blood boiled at times, or that he
+should now and again look at those in easier circumstances with snarling
+suspicion, and give vent to his feelings in words of rankling
+bitterness? Robert Burns and his father were just such men as an
+insolent factor would take a fiendish delight in torturing. 'My
+indignation yet boils,' Burns wrote years afterwards, 'at the
+recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent, threatening letters,
+which used to set us all in tears.' Had they 'boo'd and becked' at his
+bidding, and grovelled at his feet, he might have had some glimmering
+sense of justice, and thought it mercy. But the Burnses were men of a
+different stamp. 'William Burness always treated superiors with a
+becoming respect, but he never gave the smallest encouragement to
+aristocratical arrogance'; and his son Robert was not less manly and
+independent. He was too sound in judgment; too conscious of his own
+worth, to sink into mean and abject servility. But this factor, perhaps
+more than anyone else, did much to pervert, if he could not kill, the
+poet's spirit of independence.
+
+Curiously enough, the opening sentences of his autobiographical sketch
+have a suspicious ring of the pride that apes humility. There is
+something harsh and aggressive in his unnecessary confidence. 'I have
+not the most distant pretensions to assume the character which the
+pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a gentleman. When at Edinburgh
+last winter I got acquainted at the Herald's office; and, looking
+through that granary of honours, I there found almost every name in the
+kingdom; but for me,
+
+            "My ancient but ignoble blood
+    Had crept through scoundrels ever since the flood."
+
+Gules, Purpure, Argent, etc., quite disowned me.' All this is quite
+gratuitous and hardly in good taste.
+
+Yet, in spite of untoward circumstances, ceaseless drudgery, and
+insufficient diet, the family of Mount Oliphant was not utterly lost to
+happiness. With such a shrewd mother and such a father as William
+Burness--a man of whom Scotland may be justly proud--no home could be
+altogether unhappy. In Burns's picture of the family circle in _The
+Cotter's Saturday Night_ there is nothing of bitterness or gloom or
+melancholy.
+
+    'With joy unfeign'd brothers and sisters meet,
+      An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers:
+    The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnotic'd fleet;
+      Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears.
+    The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;
+      Anticipation forward points the view:
+    The mother, wi' her needle an' her shears,
+      Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new;
+    The father mixes a' wi' admonition due.'
+
+In the work of the farm, too, hard as it was, there was pleasure, and
+the poet's first song, with the picture he gives of the partners in the
+harvest field, breaks forth from this life of cheerless gloom and
+unceasing moil like a blink of sunshine through a lowering sky. Burns's
+description of how the song came to be made is worthy of quotation,
+because it gives us a very clear and well-defined likeness of himself at
+the time, a lad in years, but already counting himself among men. 'You
+know our country custom of coupling a man and a woman together in the
+labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching
+creature who just counted an autumn less. In short, she, unwittingly to
+herself, initiated me into a certain delicious passion, which ... I hold
+to be the first of human joys.... I did not well know myself why I liked
+so much to loiter behind her when returning in the evening from our
+labours; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an
+AEolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious rantann
+when I looked and fingered over her hand to pick out the nettle-stings
+and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualifications she sang
+sweetly; and 'twas her favourite Scotch reel that I attempted to give an
+embodied vehicle to in rhyme. I was not so presumptive as to imagine 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.'
+
+He had already measured himself with this moorland poet, and admits no
+inferiority; and what a laird's son has done he too may do. Writing of
+this song afterwards, Burns, who was always a keen critic, admits that
+it is 'very puerile and silly.' Still, we think there is something of
+beauty, and much of promise, in this early effusion. It has at least one
+of the merits, and, in a sense, the peculiar characteristic of all
+Burns's songs. It is sincere and natural; and that is the beginning of
+all good writing.
+
+'Thus with me,' he says, 'began love and poetry, which at times have
+been my only and ... my highest enjoyment.' This was the first-fruit of
+his poetic genius, and we doubt not that in the composition, and after
+the composition, life at Mount Oliphant was neither so cheerless nor so
+hard as it had been. A new life was opened up to him with a thousand
+nameless hopes and aspirations, though probably as yet he kept all these
+things to himself, and pondered them in his heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+LOCHLEA AND MOSSGIEL
+
+
+The farm at Mount Oliphant proved a ruinous failure, and after
+weathering their last two years on it under the tyranny of the scoundrel
+factor, it was with feelings of relief, we may be sure, that the family
+removed to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. This was a farm of 130
+acres of land rising from the right bank of the river Ayr. The farm
+appeared to them more promising than the one they had left. The prospect
+from its uplands was extensive and beautiful. It commanded a view of the
+Carrick Hills, and the Firth of Clyde beyond; but where there are
+extensive views to be had the land is necessarily exposed. The farm
+itself was bleak and bare, and twenty shillings an acre was a high rent
+for fields so situated.
+
+The younger members of the family, however, were now old enough to be of
+some assistance in the house or in the fields, and for a few years life
+was brighter than it had been before; not that labour was lighter to
+them here, but simply because they had escaped the meshes and
+machinations of a petty tyrant, and worked more cheerfully, looking to
+the future with confidence. Father, mother, and children all worked as
+hard as they were able, and none more ungrudgingly than the poet.
+
+We know little about those first few years of life at Lochlea, which
+should be matter for special thanksgiving. Better we should know nothing
+at all than that we should learn of misfortunes coming upon them, and
+see the family again in tears and forced to thole a factor's snash;
+better silence than the later unsavoury episodes, which have not yet
+been allowed decent burial. Probably life went evenly and beautifully in
+those days. The brothers accompanied their father to the fields; Agnes
+milked the cows, reciting the while to her younger sisters, Annabella
+and Isabella, snatches of song or psalm; and in the evening the whole
+family would again gather round the ingle to raise their voices in
+_Dundee_ or _Martyrs_ or _Elgin_, and then to hear the priest-like
+father read the sacred page.
+
+The little that we do know is worth recording. 'Gilbert,' to quote from
+Chambers's excellent edition of the poet's works, 'used to speak of his
+brother as being at this period a more admirable being than at any
+other. He recalled with delight the days when they had to go with one or
+two companions to cut peats for the winter fuel, because Robert was sure
+to enliven their toil with a rattling fire of witty remarks of men and
+things, mingled with the expressions of a genial glowing heart, and the
+whole perfectly free from the taint which he afterwards acquired from
+his contact with the world. Not even in those volumes which afterwards
+charmed his country from end to end, did Gilbert see his brother in so
+interesting a light as in those conversations in the bog, with only two
+or three noteless peasants for an audience.'
+
+This is a beautiful picture: the poet enlivening toil with talk,
+lighting and illustrating all he said with his lively imagination;
+Gilbert listening silently, and a group of noteless peasants dumb with
+wonder. No artist has yet painted this picture of Burns, as his brother
+saw him, at his best. Writers have glanced at the scene and passed it
+by. It needed to be looked at with naked, appreciative eyes; they had
+come with microscopes to the study of Burns. Far more interesting
+material awaited them farther on: _The Poet's Welcome_, for example!
+They could amplify that. Here, too, is the first hint of Burns's
+brilliant powers as a talker; a glimpse on this lonely peat moss of the
+man who, not many years afterwards, was to dazzle literary Edinburgh
+with the sparkle and force of his graphic speech.
+
+Probably it was about this time that Burns went for a summer to a school
+at Kirkoswald. In his autobiography he says it was his seventeenth year,
+and, if so, it must have been before the family had left Mount Oliphant.
+Gilbert's recollection was that the poet was then in his nineteenth
+year, which would bring the incident into the Lochlea period. In the new
+edition of Chambers's Burns, William Wallace accepts Robert's statement
+as correct; yet we hardly think the poet would have spent a summer at
+school at a time when the family was under the heel of that merciless
+factor. Besides, although he speaks of his seventeenth year, he has just
+made mention of the fact that he was in the secret of half the amours of
+the parish; and it was in the parish of Tarbolton that we hear of him
+acting 'as the second of night-hunting swains.' Probably also it would
+be after the family had found comparative peace and quiet in their new
+home that it would occur to Burns to resume his studies in a methodical
+way. The point is a small one. The important thing is, that in his
+seventeenth or nineteenth summer he went to a noted school on a
+smuggling coast to learn mathematics, surveying, dialling, etc., in
+which he made a pretty good progress. 'But,' he says, 'I made a greater
+progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband trade was at this
+time very successful; scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation
+were as yet new to me, and I was no enemy to social life. Here, though I
+learnt to look unconcernedly on a large tavern bill and mix without fear
+in a drunken squabble, yet I went on with a high hand in my geometry.'
+
+The glimpses we have of Burns during his stay here are all
+characteristic of the man. We see a young man looking out on a world
+that is new to him; moving in a society to which he had hitherto been a
+stranger. His eyes are opened not only to the knowledge of mankind, but
+to a better knowledge of himself. Thirsting for information and power,
+we find him walking with Willie Niven, his companion from Maybole, away
+from the village to where they might have peace and quiet, and converse
+on subjects calculated to improve their minds. They sharpen their wits
+in debate, taking sides on speculative questions, and arguing the matter
+to their own satisfaction. No doubt in these conversations and debates
+he was developing that gift of clear reasoning and lucid expression
+which afterwards so confounded the literary and legal luminaries of
+Edinburgh. They had made a study of logic, but here was a man from the
+plough who held his own with them, discussing questions which in their
+opinion demanded a special training. For an uncouth country ploughman
+gifted with song they were prepared, but they did not expect one who
+could meet them in conversation with the fence and foil of a skilled
+logician. We may see also his burning desire for distinction in that
+scene in school when he led the self-confident schoolmaster into debate
+and left him humiliated in the eyes of the pupils. Even in his contests
+with John Niven there was the same eagerness to excel. When he could not
+beat him in wrestling or putting the stone, he was fain to content
+himself with a display of his superiority in mental calisthenics. The
+very fact that a charming _fillette_ overset his trigonometry, and set
+him off at a tangent, is a characteristic ending to this summer of
+study. Peggy Thomson in her kail-yard was too much for the fiery
+imagination of a poet: 'it was in vain to think of doing more good at
+school.'
+
+Too much stress is not to be laid on Burns's own mention of 'scenes of
+swaggering riot and dissipation' at Kirkoswald. Such things were new to
+him, and made a lasting impression on his mind. We know that he returned
+home very considerably improved. His reading was enlarged with the very
+important addition of Thomson's and Shenstone's works. He had seen human
+nature in a new phasis, and now he engaged in literary correspondence
+with several of his schoolfellows.
+
+It was not long after his return from Kirkoswald that the Bachelor's
+Club was founded, and here could Burns again exercise his debating
+powers and find play for his expanding intellect. The members met to
+forget their cares in mirth and diversion, 'without transgressing the
+bounds of innocent decorum'; and the chief diversion appears to have
+been debate.
+
+If we are to believe Gilbert, the seven years of their stay in
+Tarbolton parish were not marked by much literary improvement in Robert.
+That may well have been Gilbert's opinion at the time; for the poet was
+working hard on the farm, and often spending an evening at Tarbolton or
+at one or other of the neighbouring farms. But he managed all the same
+to get through a considerable amount of reading; and though, perhaps, he
+did not devote himself so sedulously to books as he had been accustomed
+to do in the seclusion of Mount Oliphant, he was storing his mind in
+other ways. His keen observation was at work, and he was studying what
+was of more interest and importance to him than books--'men, their
+manners and their ways.' 'I seem to be one sent into the world,' he
+remarks in a letter to Mr. Murdoch, 'to see and observe; and I very
+easily compound with the knave who tricks me of my money, if there be
+anything original about him, which shows me human nature in a different
+light from anything I have seen before.' Partly it was this passion to
+see and observe, partly it was another passion that made him the
+assisting confidant of most of the country lads in their amours. 'I had
+a curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity in these matters which
+recommended me as a proper second in duels of that kind.' His song, _My
+Nannie, O_, which belongs to this period, is not only true as a lyric of
+sweet and simple love, but is also true to the particular style of
+love-making then in vogue.
+
+    'The westlin wind blaws loud an' shill;
+      The night's baith mirk and rainy, O:
+    But I'll get my plaid, an' out I'll steal,
+      An' owre the hills to Nannie, O.'
+
+According to Gilbert, the poet himself was constantly the victim of some
+fair enslaver, although, being jealous of those richer than himself, he
+was not aspiring in his loves. But while there was hardly a comely
+maiden in Tarbolton to whom he did not address a song, we are not to
+imagine that he was frittering his heart away amongst them all. A poet
+may sing lyrics of love to many while his heart is true to one. The one
+at this time to Robert Burns was Ellison Begbie, to whom some of his
+songs are addressed--notably _Mary Morrison_, one of the purest and most
+beautiful love lyrics ever poet penned. Nothing is more striking than
+the immense distance between this composition and any he had previously
+written. In this song he for the first time stepped to the front rank as
+a song-writer, and gave proof to himself, if to nobody else at the time,
+of the genius that was in him. A few letters to Ellison Begbie are also
+preserved, pure and honourable in sentiment, but somewhat artificial and
+formal in expression. It was because of his love for her, and his desire
+to be settled in life, that he took to the unfortunate flax-dressing
+business in Irvine. That is something of an unlovely and mysterious
+episode in Burns's life. Suffice it to say in his own words: 'This
+turned out a sadly unlucky affair. My partner was a scoundrel of the
+first water, and, to finish the whole business, while we were giving a
+welcome carousal to the New Year, our shop, by the drunken carelessness
+of my partner's wife, took fire and burned to ashes, and I was left,
+like a true poet, not worth a sixpence.'
+
+His stay at Irvine was neither pleasant for him at the time nor happy in
+its results. He met there 'acquaintances of a freer manner of thinking
+and living than he had been used to'; and it needs something more than
+the family misfortunes and the deathbed of his father to account for
+that terrible fit of hypochondria when he returned to Lochlea. 'For
+three months I was in a diseased state of body and mind, scarcely to be
+envied by the hopeless wretches who have just got their sentence,
+_Depart from me, ye cursed_.'
+
+Up to this time, the twenty-fifth year of his age, Burns had not written
+much. Besides _Mary Morrison_ might be mentioned _The Death and Dying
+Words of Poor Mailie_, and another bewitching song, _The Rigs o'
+Barley_, which is surely an expression of the innocent abandon, the
+delicious rapture of pure and trustful love. But what he had written was
+work of promise, while at least one or two of his songs had the artistic
+finish as well as the spontaneity of genuine poetry. In all that he had
+done, 'puerile and silly,' to quote his own criticism of _Handsome
+Nell_, or at times halting and crude, there was the ring of sincerity.
+He was not merely an echo, as too many polished poetasters in their
+first attempts have been. Such jinglers are usually as happy in their
+juvenile effusions as in their later efforts. But Burns from the first
+tried to express what was in him, what he himself felt, and in so far
+had set his feet on the road to perfection. Being natural, he was bound
+to improve by practice, and if there was genius in him to become in time
+a great poet. That he was already conscious of his powers we know, and
+the longing for fame, 'that last infirmity of noble mind,' was strong in
+him and continually growing stronger.
+
+    'Then out into the world my course I did determine,
+    Though to be rich was not my wish, yet to be great was charming;
+    My talents they were not the worst, nor yet my education;
+    Resolved was I at least to try to mend my situation.'
+
+Before this he had thought of more ambitious things than songs, and had
+sketched the outlines of a tragedy; but it was only after meeting with
+Fergusson's _Scotch Poems_ that he 'struck his wildly resounding lyre
+with rustic vigour.' In his commonplace book, begun in 1783, we have
+ever-recurring hints of his devoting himself to poetry. 'For my own part
+I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got
+once heartily in love, and then Rhyme and Song were in a measure the
+spontaneous language of my heart.'
+
+The story of Wallace from the poem by Blind Harry had years before fired
+his imagination, and his heart had glowed with a wish to make a song on
+that hero in some measure equal to his merits.
+
+    'E'en then, a wish, I mind its power--
+    A wish that to my latest hour
+      Shall strongly heave my breast--
+    That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake,
+    Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,
+      Or sing a sang at least.'
+
+This was written afterwards, but it is retrospective of the years of his
+dawning ambition.
+
+For a time, however, all dreams of greatness are to be set aside as
+vain. The family had again fallen on evil days, and when the father
+died, his all went 'among the hell-hounds that grovel in the kennel of
+justice.' This was no time for poetry, and Robert was too much of a man
+to think merely of his own aims and ambitions in such a crisis. It was
+only by ranking as creditors to their father's estate for arrears of
+wages that the children of William Burness made a shift to scrape
+together a little money, with which Robert and Gilbert were able to
+stock the neighbouring farm of Mossgiel. Thither the family removed in
+March 1784; and it is on this farm that the life of the poet becomes
+most deeply interesting. The remains of the father were buried in
+Alloway Kirkyard; and on a small tombstone over the grave the poet bears
+record to the blameless life of the loving husband, the tender father,
+and the friend of man. He had lived long enough to hear some of his
+son's poems, and to express admiration for their beauty; but he had also
+noted the passionate nature of his first-born. There was one of his
+family, he said on his deathbed, for whose future he feared; and Robert
+knew who that one was. He turned to the window, the tears streaming down
+his cheeks.
+
+Mossgiel, to which the brothers now removed, taking with them their
+widowed mother, was a farm of about one hundred and eighteen acres of
+cold clayey soil, close to the village of Mauchline. The farm-house,
+having been originally the country house of their landlord, Mr. Gavin
+Hamilton, was more commodious and comfortable than the home they had
+left. Here the brothers settled down, determined to do all in their
+power to succeed. They made a fresh start in life, and if hard work and
+rigid economy could have compelled success, they might now have looked
+to the future with an assurance of comparative prosperity. Mr. Gavin
+Hamilton was a kind and generous landlord, and the rent was only L90 a
+year; considerably lower than they had paid at Lochlea.
+
+But misfortune seemed to pursue this family, and ruin to wait on their
+every undertaking. Burns says: '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, the world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man; but the
+first year, from unfortunately buying in bad seed; the second from a
+late harvest, we lost half of both 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.'
+
+That this resolution was not just taken in a repentant mood merely to be
+forgotten again in a month's time, Gilbert bears convincing testimony.
+'My brother's allowance and mine was L7 per annum each, and during the
+whole time this family concern lasted, which was four years, as well as
+during the preceding period at Lochlea, his expenses never in any one
+year exceeded his slender income. His temperance and frugality were
+everything that could be wished.'
+
+Honest, however, as Burns's resolution was, it was not to be expected
+that he would--or, indeed, could--give up the practice of poetry, or
+cease to indulge in dreams of after-greatness. Poetry, as he has already
+told us, had become the spontaneous expression of his heart. It was his
+natural speech. His thoughts appeared almost to demand poetry as their
+proper vehicle of expression, and rhythmed into verse as inevitably as
+in chemistry certain solutions solidify in crystals. Besides this, Burns
+was conscious of his abilities. He had measured himself with his
+fellows, and knew his superiority. More than likely he had been
+measuring himself with the writers he had studied, and found himself not
+inferior. The great misfortune of his life, as he confessed himself, was
+never to have an aim. He had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but
+they were like gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave.
+Now, however, we have come to a period of his life when he certainly did
+have an aim, but necessity compelled him to renounce it as soon as it
+was recognised. It was not a question of ploughing or poetry. There was
+no alternative. However insidiously inclination might whisper of poetry,
+duty's voice called him to the fields, and that voice he determined to
+obey. Reading farming books and calculating crops is not a likely road
+to perfection in poetry. Yet, in spite of all noble resolution, the
+voice of Poesy was sweet, and he could not shut his ears to it. He might
+sing a song to himself, even though it were but to cheer him after the
+labours of the day, and he sang of love in 'the genuine language of his
+heart.'
+
+    'There's nought but care on every hand,
+      In every hour that passes, O:
+    What signifies the life o' man,
+      An' 'twere na for the lasses, O?'
+
+For song must come in spite of him. The caged lark sings, though its
+field be but a withered sod, and the sky above it a square foot of green
+baize. Nor was his commonplace book neglected; and in August we come
+upon an entry which shows that poetical aspirations were again
+possessing him; this time not to be cast forth, either at the timorous
+voice of Prudence or the importunate bidding of Poverty. Burns has
+calmly and critically taken stock--so to speak--of his literary
+aptitudes and abilities, and recognised his fitness for a place in the
+ranks of Scotland's poets. 'However I am pleased with the works of our
+Scotch poets, particularly the excellent Ramsay, and the still more
+excellent Fergusson, yet I am hurt to see other places of Scotland,
+their towns, rivers, woods, haughs, etc., immortalised in such
+celebrated performances, whilst my dear native country, the ancient
+Bailieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and
+modern times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants; a country
+where civil and particularly religious liberty have ever found their
+first support and their last asylum, a country the birthplace of many
+famous philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the scene of many
+important events in Scottish history, particularly a great many of the
+actions of the glorious Wallace, the saviour of his country; yet we have
+never had one Scottish poet of any eminence to make the fertile banks of
+Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered scenes of Aire, and the
+heathy mountainous source and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth,
+Ettrick, Tweed, etc. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy; but,
+alas! I am far unequal to the task, both in native genius and education.
+Obscure I am, and obscure I must be, though no young poet nor young
+soldier's heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine.' The same
+thoughts and aspirations are echoed later in his _Epistle to William
+Simpson_--
+
+    'Ramsay and famous Fergusson
+    Gied Forth and Tay a lift aboon;
+    Yarrow and Tweed, to mony a tune,
+                Owre Scotland rings,
+    While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, and Doon,
+                Naebody sings.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    We'll gar our streams and burnies shine
+                Up wi' the best!'
+
+The dread of obscurity spoken of here was almost a weakness with Burns.
+We hear it like an ever-recurring wail in his poems and letters. In the
+very next entry in his commonplace book, after praising the old bards,
+and drawing a parallel between their sources of inspiration and his own,
+he shudders to think that his fate may be such as theirs. 'Oh mortifying
+to a bard's vanity, their very names are buried in the wreck of things
+that were!'
+
+Close on the heels of these entries came troubles on the head of the
+luckless poet, troubles more serious than bad seed and late harvests.
+During the summer of 1784, we know that he was in bad health, and again
+subject to melancholy. His verses at this time are of a religious cast,
+serious and sombre, the confession of fault, and the cry of repentance.
+
+    'Thou know'st that Thou hast formed me
+      With passions wild and strong;
+    And listening to their witching voice
+      Has often led me wrong.'
+
+Perhaps this is only the prelude to his verses to Rankine, written
+towards the close of the year, and his poem, _A Poet's Welcome_. They
+must at least be all read together, if we are to have any clear
+conception of the nature of Burns. It is not enough to select his
+_Epistle to Rankine_, and speak of its unbecoming levity. This was the
+time when Burns was first subjected to ecclesiastical discipline; and
+some of his biographers have tried to trace the origin of that wonderful
+series of satires, written shortly afterwards, to the vengeful feelings
+engendered in the poet by this degradation. But Burns's attack on the
+effete and corrupt ceremonials of the Church was not a burst of personal
+rancour and bitterness. The attack came of something far deeper and
+nobler, and was bound to be delivered sooner or later. His own personal
+experience, and the experience of his worthy landlord, Gavin Hamilton,
+may have given the occasion, but the cause of the attack was in the
+Church itself, and in Burns's inborn loathing of humbug, hypocrisy, and
+cant.
+
+Well was it the satires were written by so powerful a satirist, that the
+Church purged itself of the evil thing and cleansed its ways. This,
+however, is an episode of such importance in the life of Burns, and in
+the religious history of Scotland, as to require to be taken up
+carefully and considered by itself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE SERIES OF SATIRES
+
+
+Before we can clearly see and understand Burns's attitude to the Church,
+we must have studied the nature of the man himself, and we must know
+something also of his religious training. It will not be enough to
+select his series of satires, and, from a study of them alone, try to
+make out the character of the man. His previous life must be known; the
+natural bent of his mind apprehended, and once that is grasped, these
+satires will appeal to the heart and understanding of the reader with a
+sense of naturalness and expectedness. They are as inevitable as his
+love lyrics, and are read with the conviction that his merciless
+exposure of profanity masquerading in the habiliments of religion, was
+part of the life-work and mission of this great poet. He had been born,
+it is recognised, not only to sing the loves and joys and sorrows of his
+fellow men and women, but to purge their lives of grossness, and their
+religion of the filth of hypocrisy and cant. Let it be admitted, that he
+himself went 'a kennin wrang.' What argument is there? We do not deny
+the divine mission of Samson because of Delilah. Surely that giant's
+life was a wasted one, yet in his very death he was true to his mission,
+and fulfilled the purpose of his birth. In other lands and in other
+times the satirist is recognised and his work appraised; the abuses he
+scourged, the pretensions he ridiculed, are seen in all their
+hideousness; but when a great satirist arises amongst ourselves to probe
+the ulcers of pharisaism, he is banned as a profaner of holy things,
+touching with impious hands the ark of the covenant. Why should the
+_cloth_--as it is so ingenuously called--be touched with delicate hands,
+unless it be that it is shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the
+eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the
+Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties;
+he typifies the conventional righteousness and religion of his time.
+
+Let us have done with all this timidity and coward tenderness. If the
+Church is filthy, it must be cleansed; if there be money-changers within
+its gates, let them be driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe
+of the _cloth_, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains of a
+pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with the manliness and courage
+of true religion. But prophets have no honour in their own country,
+rarely in their own time; they have ever been persecuted, and it is the
+Church's martyrs that have handed down through the ages the light of the
+world.
+
+The profanities and religious blasphemies Burns attacked were evils
+insidious and poisonous, eating to the very heart of the religious life
+of the country, and they required a desperate remedy. Let us be thankful
+that the remedy was applied in time; and, looking to the righteousness
+he wrought, let us bless the name of Burns.
+
+Burns's father, stern and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict
+Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious
+Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William
+Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical
+Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too
+loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and
+unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that day has
+been here softened down into something not very far from Arminianism. He
+had had a hard experience in the world himself, and that may have drawn
+him nearer to his suffering fellow-men and into closer communion with
+his God. He had learned that religion is a thing of the spirit, and not
+a matter of creeds and catechisms. Of Robert Burns's own religion it
+would be impertinent to inquire too curiously. The religion of a man is
+not to be paraded before the public like the manifesto of a party
+politician. After all, is there a single man who can sincerely, without
+equivocation or mental reservation, label himself Calvinist, Arminian,
+Socinian, or Pelagian? If there be, his mind must be a marvel of
+mathematical nicety and nothing more. All that we need know of Burns is
+that he was naturally and sincerely religious; that he worshipped an
+all-loving Father, and believed in an ever-present God; that his charity
+was boundless; that he loved what was good and true, and hated with an
+indignant hatred whatever was loathsome and false. He loved greatly his
+fellow-creatures, man and beast and flower; he could even find something
+to pity in the fate of the devil himself. That he was not orthodox, in
+the narrow interpretation of orthodoxy in his day, we are well enough
+aware, else had he not been the poet we love and cherish.
+
+In his early days at Mount Oliphant there is a hint of these later
+satires. 'Polemical divinity about this time was,' he says, 'putting the
+country half-mad, and I, ambitious of shining on Sundays, between
+sermons, in conversation parties, at funerals, etc., in a few years
+more, used 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.' And heresy is a terrible cry to raise against a man in Scotland.
+In those days it was Anathema-maranatha; even now it is still the
+war-slogan of the Assemblies.
+
+The polemical divinity which he refers to as putting the country
+half-mad was the wordy war that was being carried on at that time
+between the Auld Lights and the New Lights. These New Lights, as they
+were called, were but a birth of the social and religious upheaval that
+was going on in Scotland and elsewhere. The spirit of revolution was
+abroad; in France it became acutely political; in Scotland there was a
+desire for greater religious freedom. The Church, as reformed by Knox,
+was requiring to be re-reformed. The yoke of papacy had been lifted
+certainly, but the yoke of pseudo-Protestantism which had taken its
+place was quite as heavy on the necks of the people. So long as it had
+been new; so long as it had been of their own choosing, it had been
+endured willingly. But a generation was springing up--stiff-necked they
+might have been called, in that they fretted under the yoke of their
+fathers--that sought to be delivered from the tyranny of their pastors
+and the fossilised formalism of their creed. To the people in their
+bondage a prophet was born, and that prophet was Robert Burns.
+
+It was natural that a man of Burns's temperament and clearness of
+perception should be on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of
+his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the
+strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,--surely in
+itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter
+of religion,--we have an interesting reflection which gives us some
+insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many
+instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason and
+common sense in matters of religion. Whenever we neglect or despise
+those sacred monitors, the whimsical notions of a perturbed brain are
+taken for the immediate influences of the Deity, and the wildest
+fanaticism and the most inconsistent absurdities will meet with abettors
+and converts. Nay, I have often thought that the more out of the way and
+ridiculous their fancies are, if once they are sanctified under the name
+of religion, the unhappy, mistaken votaries are the more firmly glued to
+them.'
+
+The man who wrote that was certainly not the man, when the day of battle
+came, to join himself with the orthodox party, the party that stuck to
+the pure, undiluted Puritanism of Covenanting times. Yet many
+biographers have not seen the bearing that such a letter has on Burns's
+attitude to the Church. Principal Shairp seems to say that Burns, had it
+not been for the accident of ecclesiastical discipline to which he had
+been subjected, would have joined the orthodox party. The notion is
+absurd. Burns had attacked orthodox Calvinism even in his boyhood, and
+was already tainted with heresy. 'These men,' the worthy Principal
+informs us, 'were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and stout
+protesters against patronage. All Burns's instincts would naturally have
+been on the side of those who wished to resist patronage and "cowe the
+lairds" had not this, his natural tendency, been counteracted by a
+stronger bias drawing him in an opposite direction.' This is a
+narrowing--if not even a positive misconception--of the case with a
+vengeance. The question was not of patronage at all, but of moral and
+religious freedom; while the democracy of those ministers was a terribly
+one-sided democracy. The lairds may have dubbed them democrats, but they
+were aristocratic enough, despotic even, to their herds. But Principal
+Shairp has been led altogether wrong by imagining that 'Burns, smarting
+under the strict church discipline, naturally threw himself into the
+arms of the opposite or New Light party, who were more easy in their
+life and in their doctrine.' More charitable also, and Christ-like in
+their judgments, I should fain hope; less blinded by a superstitious awe
+of the Church. 'Nothing could have been more unfortunate,' he continues,
+'than that in this crisis of his career he should have fallen into
+intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded men.' Surely this zeal
+for the Church has carried him too far. Were these men all coarse
+minded? Nobody believes it. The coarse-minded Dr. Dalrymple of Ayr, and
+the coarse-minded Mr. Lawrie of Loudon! This is not argument. Besides,
+it is perfectly gratuitous. The question, again, is not one of men--that
+ecclesiastical discipline has been an offence and a
+stumbling-block--either coarse minded or otherwise. It is a question of
+principle, and Burns fought for it with keen-edged weapons.
+
+It would be altogether a mistake to identify Burns with the New Light
+party, or with any other sect. He was a law unto himself in religion,
+and would bind himself by no creed. Because he attacked rigid orthodoxy
+as upheld by Auld Light doctrine, that does not at all mean that he was
+espousing, through thick and thin, the cause of the New Light party. He
+fought in his own name, with his own weapons, and for humanity. It ought
+to be clearly understood that in his series of satires he was not
+attacking the orthodoxy of the Auld Lights from the bulwarks of any
+other creed. His criticism was altogether destructive. From his own
+conception of a wise and loving God he satirised what he conceived to be
+their irrational and inhuman conception of Deity, whose attitude towards
+mankind was assuredly not that of a father to his children. Burns's God
+was a God of love; the god they worshipped was the creation of their
+creed, a god of election. It is quite true that Burns made many friends
+amongst the New Lights, but we are certain he did not hold by all their
+tenets or subscribe to their doctrine. In the _Dictionary of National
+Biography_ we read: 'Burns represented the revolt of a virile and
+imaginative nature against a system of belief and practice which, as he
+judged, had degenerated into mere bigotry and pharisaism.... That Burns,
+like Carlyle, who at once retained the sentiment and rejected the creed
+of his race more decidedly than Burns, could sympathise with the higher
+religious sentiments of his class is proved by _The Cotter's Saturday
+Night_.'
+
+Principal Shairp, however, has not seen the matter in this broad light.
+All he sees is a man of keen insight and vigorous powers of reasoning,
+who 'has not only his own quarrel with the parish minister and the
+stricter clergy to revenge, but the quarrel also of his friend and
+landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county lawyer who had fallen under church
+censure for neglect of church ordinances,'--a question of new potatoes
+in fact,--'and had been debarred from the communion.'
+
+It is pleasing to see that the academic spirit is not always so blinding
+and blighting. Professor Blackie recognises that the abuses Burns
+castigated were real abuses, and admits that the verdict of time has
+been in his favour. 'In the case of _Holy Willie_ and _The Holy Fair_,'
+he remarks, 'the lash was wisely and effectively wielded'; and on
+another occasion he wrote, 'Though a sensitive pious mind will naturally
+shrink from the bold exposure of devout abuses in holy things, in _The
+Holy Fair_ and other similar satires, on a broad view of the matter we
+cannot but think that the castigation was reasonable, and the man who
+did it showed an amount of independence, frankness, and moral courage
+that amply compensates for the rudeness of the assault.'
+
+Rude, the assault certainly was and overwhelming. Augean stables are not
+to be cleansed with a spray of rose-water.
+
+Lockhart, whilst recognising the force and keenness of these satires,
+has regretfully pointed out that the very things Burns satirised were
+part of the same religious system which produced the scenes described in
+_The Cotter's Saturday Night_. But is this not really the explanation of
+the whole matter? It was just because Burns had seen the beauty of true
+religion at home, that he was fired to fight to the death what was false
+and rotten. It was the cause of true religion that he espoused.
+
+    'All hail religion! Maid divine,
+    Pardon a muse so mean as mine,
+    Who in her rough imperfect line
+          Thus dares to name thee.
+    To stigmatise false friends of thine
+          Can ne'er defame thee.'
+
+Compare the reading of the sacred page, when the family is gathered
+round the ingle, and 'the sire turns o'er with patriarchal grace the big
+ha'-bible' and 'wales a portion with judicious care,' with the reading
+of _Peebles frae the Water fit_--
+
+    'See, up he's got the word o' God,
+    And meek and mim has viewed it.'
+
+What a contrast! The two readings are as far apart as is heaven from
+hell, as far as the true from the false. It is strange that both
+Lockhart and Shairp should have stumbled on the explanation of Burns's
+righteous satire in these poems; should have been so near it, and yet
+have missed it. It was just because Burns could write _The Cotter's
+Saturday Night_ that he could write _The Holy Tulzie_, _Holy Willie's
+Prayer_, _The Ordination_, and _The Holy Fair_. Had he not felt the
+beauty of that family worship at home; had he not seen the purity and
+holiness of true religion, how could such scenes as those described in
+_The Holy Fair_, or such hypocrisy as Holy Willie's, ever have moved him
+to scathing satire? Where was the poet's indignation to come from? That
+is not to be got by tricks of rhyme or manufactured by rules of metre;
+but let it be alive and burning in the heart of the poet, and all else
+will be added unto him for the perfect poem, as it was to Burns. That
+Burns, though he wrote in humorous satire, was moved to the writing by
+indignation, he tells us in his epistle to the Rev. John M'Math--
+
+    'But I gae mad at their grimaces,
+    Their sighin', cantin', grace-prood faces,
+    Their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces,
+                  Their raxin' conscience,
+    Whase greed, revenge, and pride disgraces
+                  Waur nor their nonsense.'
+
+The first of Burns's satires, if we except his epistle to John Goudie,
+wherein we have a hint of the acute differences of the time, is his poem
+_The Twa Herds_, or _The Holy Tulzie_. The two herds were the Rev. John
+Russell and the Rev. Alexander Moodie, both afterwards mentioned in _The
+Holy Fair_. These reverend gentlemen, so long sworn friends, bound by a
+common bond of enmity against a certain New Light minister of the name
+of Lindsay, 'had a bitter black outcast,' and, in the words of Lockhart,
+'abused each other _coram populo_ with a fiery virulence of personal
+invective such as has long been banished from all popular assemblies.'
+This degrading spectacle of two priests ordained to preach the gospel of
+love, attacking each other with all the rancour of malice and
+uncharitableness, and foaming with the passion of a pothouse, was too
+flagrant an occasion for satire for Burns to miss. He held them up to
+ridicule in _The Holy Tulzie_, and showed them themselves as others saw
+them. It has been objected by some that Burns made use of humorous
+satire; did not censure with the fiery fervour of a righteous
+indignation. Burns used the weapon he could handle best; and a powerful
+weapon it is in the hands of a master. We acknowledge Horace's satires
+to be scathing enough, though they are light and delicate, almost
+trifling and flippant at times. He has not the volcanic utterance of
+Juvenal, but I doubt not his castigations were quite as effective.
+'Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?' Burns might have well
+replied to his censors with the same question. Quick on the heels of
+this poem came _Holy Willie's Prayer_, wherein he took up the cudgels
+for his friend, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, and fought for him in his own
+enthusiastic way. The satire here is so scathing and scarifying that we
+can only read and wonder, shuddering the while for the wretched creature
+so pitilessly flayed. Not a word is wasted; not a line without weight.
+The character of the self-righteous, sensual, spiteful Pharisee is a
+merciless exposure, and, hardest of all, the picture is convincing. For
+Burns believed in his own mind that these men, Holy Willie and the crew
+he typified, were thoroughly dishonest. They were not in his
+judgment--and Burns had keen insight--mere bigots dehumanised by their
+creed, but a pack of scheming, calculating scoundrels.
+
+    'They take religion in their mouth,
+    They talk o' mercy, grace, and truth,
+    For what? to gie their malice skouth
+                On some puir wight,
+    And hunt him down, o'er right and ruth
+                To ruin straight.'
+
+But it must be noted in _Holy Willie_ that the poet is not letting
+himself out in a burst of personal spleen. He is again girding at the
+rigidity of a lopped and maimed Calvinism, and attacking the creed
+through the man. The poem is a living presentment of the undiluted,
+puritanic doctrine of the Auld Light party, to whom Calvinism meant only
+a belief in hell and an assurance of their own election. It is evident
+that Burns was not sound on either essential. _The Address to the Unco
+Guid_ is a natural sequel to this poem, and, in a sense, its
+culmination. There is the same strength of satire, but now it is more
+delicate and the language more dignified. There is the same condemnation
+of pharisaism; but the poem rises to a higher level in its appeal for
+charitable views of human frailty, and its kindly counsel to silence;
+judgment is to be left to Him who
+
+    'Knows each cord, its various tone,
+      Each spring its various bias.'
+
+Of all the series of satires, however, _The Holy Fair_ is the most
+remarkable. It is in a sense a summing up of all the others that
+preceded it. The picture it gives of the mixed and motley multitude
+fairing in the churchyard at Mauchline, with a relay of ministerial
+mountebanks catering for their excitement, is true to the life. It is
+begging the question to deplore that Burns was provoked to such an
+attack. The scene was provocation sufficient to any right-thinking man
+who associated the name of religion with all that was good and beautiful
+and true. Such a state of things demanded reformation. The
+churchyard--that holy ground on which the church was built and
+sanctified by the dust of pious and saintly men--cried aloud against the
+desecration to which it was subjected; and Burns, who alone had the
+power to purify it from such profanities, would have been untrue to
+himself and a traitor to the religion of his country had he merely
+shrugged his shoulders and allowed things to go on as they were going.
+And after all what was the result? For the poem is part and parcel of
+the end it achieved. 'There is a general feeling in Ayrshire,' says
+Chambers, 'that _The Holy Fair_ was attended with a good effect; for
+since its appearance the custom of resorting to the occasion in
+neighbouring parishes for the sake of holiday-making has been much
+abated and a great increase of decorous observance has taken place.' To
+that nothing more need be added.
+
+In this series of satires _The Address to the Deil_ ought also to be
+included. Burns had no belief at all in that Frankenstein creation. It
+was too bad, he thought, to invent such a monster for the express
+purpose of imputing to him all the wickedness of the world. If such a
+creature existed, he was rather sorry for the maligned character, and
+inclined to think that there might be mercy even for him.
+
+    'I'm wae to think upon yon den,
+            Even for your sake.'
+
+Speaking of this address, Auguste Angellier says: 'All at once in their
+homely speech they heard the devil addressed not only without awe, but
+with a spice of good-fellowship and friendly familiarity. They had never
+heard the devil spoken of in this tone before. It was a charming
+address, jocund, full of raillery and good-humour, with a dash of
+friendliness, as if the two speakers had been cronies and companions
+ready to jog along arm in arm to the nether regions. He simply laughs
+Satan out of countenance, turns him to ridicule, pokes his fun at him,
+scolds and defies him just as he might have treated a person from whom
+he had nothing to fear. Nor is that all. He must admonish him, tell him
+he has been naughty long enough, and wind up by giving him some good
+advice, counselling him to mend his ways. This was certainly without
+theological precedent. It was, however, a simple idea which would have
+arranged matters splendidly.... Even to-day to speak well of the devil
+is an abomination almost as serious as to speak evil of the Deity. There
+was assuredly a great fortitude of mind as well as daring of conduct to
+write such a piece as this.'
+
+The poem has done more than anything else to kill the devil of
+superstition in Scotland. After his death he found, it is averred, a
+quiet resting-place in Kirkcaldy, where pious people have built a church
+on his grave.
+
+When Burns later in life made the witches and warlocks dance to the
+piping of the devil in Alloway's auld haunted kirk, he was but
+assembling them in their fit and proper house of meeting. Here had they
+been called into being; here had they the still-born children of
+superstition been thrashed into life and trained in unholiness. One can
+imagine them oozing out from the walls that had echoed their names so
+often through centuries of Sabbath days. The devil himself, by virtue of
+his rank, takes his place in the east, rising we have no doubt from the
+very spot on which the pulpit once had stood. In the church had
+superstition exorcised this hellish legion out of the dead mass of
+ignorance into the swarming maggots that batten on corruption; and it
+was in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that here their
+spirits should abide, and, when they took bodily shape, that they should
+assume the form and feature in which their mother Superstition had
+conceived them.
+
+Upon the holy table too lay 'twa span-lang wee unchristened bairns.' For
+this hell the poet pictures is the creation of a creed that throngs it
+with the souls of innocent babes. 'Suffer little children to come unto
+me,' Christ had said; 'for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' 'But
+unbaptized children must come unto me,' the devil of superstition said;
+'for of such is the kingdom of hell.'
+
+What pathos is in this line of Burns! There is in its slow spondaic
+movement an eternity of tears. Could satire or sermon have shown more
+forcibly the revolting inhumanity of a doctrine upheld as divine? Yet
+were there devout men, in other things gentle and loving and charitable,
+who preached this as the law of a loving God. With one stroke of genius
+they were brought face to face with the logical sequence of their
+barbarous teaching, and that without a word of coarseness or a touch of
+caricature.
+
+Only once again did Burns return to this attack on bigotry and
+superstition, and that was when he was induced to fight for Dr. Macgill
+in _The Kirk's Alarm_. But he had done his part in the series of satires
+of this year to expose the loathsomeness of hypocrisy and to purge holy
+places and the most solemn ceremonies of what was blasphemous and
+grossly profane. That in this Burns was fulfilling a part of his mission
+as a poet, we can hardly doubt; and that his work wrought for
+righteousness, the purer religious life that followed amply proves. The
+true poet is also a prophet; and Robert Burns was a prophet when he
+spoke forth boldly and fearlessly the truth that was in him, and dared
+to say that sensuality was foul even in an elder of the kirk, and that
+profanities were abhorred of God even though sanctioned and sanctified
+under the sacred name of religion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE KILMARNOCK EDITION
+
+
+_The Holy Tulzie_ had been written probably in April 1785, and the
+greatest of the satires, _The Holy Fair_, is dated August of the same
+year. It may, however, have been only drafted, and partly written, when
+the recent celebration of the sacrament at Mauchline was fresh in the
+poet's mind. At the very latest, it must have been taken up, completed,
+and perfected, in the early months of 1786. That is a period of some ten
+months between the first and the last of this series of satires; and
+during that time he had composed _Holy Willie's Prayer_, _The Address to
+the Deil_, _The Ordination_, and _The Address to the Unco Guid_. But
+this represents a very small part of the poetry written by Burns during
+this busy period. From the spring of 1785 on to the autumn of 1786 was a
+time of great productiveness in his life, a productiveness unparalleled
+in the life of any other poet. If, according to Gilbert, the seven years
+of their stay at Lochlea were not marked by much literary improvement in
+his brother, we take it that the poet had been 'lying fallow' all those
+years; and what a rich harvest do we have now! Here, indeed, was a
+reward worth waiting for. To read over the names of the poems, songs,
+and epistles written within such a short space of time amazes us. And
+there is hardly a poem in the whole collection without a claim to
+literary excellence. A month or two previous to the composition of his
+first satire he had written what Gilbert calls his first poem, _The
+Epistle to Davie_, 'a brother poet, lover, ploughman, and fiddler.' It
+is worthy of notice that, in the opening lines of this poem--
+
+    'While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw,
+    And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,
+      And hing us ower the ingle'--
+
+we see the poet and his surroundings, as he sets himself down to write.
+He plunges, as Horace advises, in _medias res_, and we have the
+atmosphere of the poem in the first phrase. This is Burns's usual way of
+beginning his poems and epistles, as well as a great many of his songs.
+The metre of this poem Burns has evidently taken from _The Cherry and
+the Slae_, by Alexander Montgomery, which he must have read in Ramsay's
+_Evergreen_. The stanza is rather complicated, although Burns, with his
+extraordinary command and pliancy of language, uses it from the first
+with masterly ease. But there is much more than mere jugglery of words
+in the poem. Indeed, such is this poet's seeming simplicity of speech
+that his masterly manipulation of metres always comes as an
+afterthought. It never disturbs us in our first reading of the poem.
+Gilbert's opinion of this poem is worth recording, the more especially
+as he expressly tells us that the first idea of Robert's becoming an
+author was started on this occasion. 'I thought it,' he says, 'at least
+equal to, if not superior, to many of Allan Ramsay's epistles, and that
+the merit of these and much other Scottish poetry seemed to consist
+principally in the knack of the expression; but here there was a strain
+of interesting sentiment, and the Scotticism of the language scarcely
+seemed affected, but appeared to be the natural language of the poet.'
+It startles us to hear Gilbert talking thus of the Scotticism, after
+having heard so much of Robert Burns writing naturally in the speech of
+his home and county. In this poem we have, at least, the first proof of
+that graphic power in which Burns has never been excelled, and in it we
+have the earliest mention of his Bonnie Jean. In his next poem, _Death
+and Dr. Hornbook_, his command of language and artistic phrasing are
+more apparent, while pawky humour and genial satire sparkle and flash
+from every line. The poem is written in that form of verse which Burns
+has made particularly his own. He had become acquainted with it, it is
+most likely, in the writings of Fergusson, Ramsay, and Gilbertfield, who
+had used it chiefly for comic subjects; but Burns showed that, in his
+hands at least, it could be made the vehicle of the most pensive and
+tender feeling. In an interesting note to the _Centenary Burns_, edited
+by Henley and Henderson, it is pointed out that 'the six-line stave in
+rime couee built on two rhymes,' was used by the Troubadours in their
+_Chansons de Gestes_, and that it dates at the very latest from the
+eleventh century. Burns's happiest use of it was in those epistles which
+about this time he began to dash off to some of his friends; and it is
+with these epistles that the uninterrupted stream of poetry of this
+season may be said properly to begin. Perhaps it was in the use of this
+stanza that Burns first discovered his command of rhymes and his
+felicity of phrasing. Certain it is, that after his first epistle to
+Lapraik, we have epistles, poems, songs, satires flowing from his pen,
+uninterrupted for a period, and apparently with marvellous ease. It has
+to be remembered, too, that he was now inspired by the dream of becoming
+an author--in print. When or where or how, had not been determined; but
+the idea was delightful all the same; the hope was inspiration itself.
+Some day his work would be published, and he would be read and talked
+about! He would have done something for poor auld Scotland's sake. The
+one thing now was to make the book, and to that he set himself
+deliberately. Poetry was at last to have its chance. Farming had been
+tried, with little success. The crops of 1784 had been a failure, and
+this year they were hardly more promising. In these discouraging
+circumstances the poet was naturally driven in upon himself. His eyes
+were turned _ad intra_, and he sought consolation in his Muse. He was
+conscious of some poetical ability, and he knew that his compositions
+were not destitute of merit. Poetry, too, was to him, and particularly
+so at this time, its own exceeding great reward. He rhymed 'for fun';
+and probably he was finding in the exercise that excitement his
+passionate nature craved. Herein was his stimulant after the routine of
+farm-work--spiritless work that was little better than slavery,
+incessant and achieving nothing. We can imagine him in those days
+returning from the fields, 'forjesket, sair, with weary legs,' and
+becoming buoyant as soon as he has opened the drawer of that small deal
+table in the garret.
+
+    'Leeze me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure,
+    My chief, amaist, my only pleasure;
+    At hame, afield, at wark or leisure,
+              The Muse, poor hizzie,
+    Though rough and raploch be her measure,
+              She's seldom lazy.'
+
+But, lazy or not, she becomes 'ramfeezled' with constant work, when he
+vows if 'the thowless jad winna mak it clink,' to prose it,--a terrible
+threat. For he must write, though it be but to keep despondency at arm's
+length. Yet it had become more than a pleasure and a recreation to him;
+and this he was beginning to understand. This, after all, was his real
+work, not the drudgery of the fields; in it he must live his life, and
+fulfil his mission. The more he wrote the more he accustomed himself
+with the idea of being an author. He knew that the critic-folk, deep
+read in books, might scoff at the very suggestion of a ploughman turning
+poet, but he recognised also that they might be wrong. It was not by
+dint of Greek that Parnassus was to be climbed. 'Ae spark o' Nature's
+fire' was the one thing needful for poetry that was to touch the heart.
+
+    'The star that rules my luckless lot,
+    Has fated me the russet coat,
+    And damned my fortune to the groat;
+              But, in requit,
+    Has blest me with a random shot
+              O' countra wit.
+
+    This while my notion's ta'en a sklent,
+    To try my fate in guid, black prent;
+    But still the mair I'm that way bent,
+              Something cries, "Hoolie!
+    I red you, honest man, tak tent!
+              Ye'll shaw your folly.
+
+    "There's ither poets, much your betters,
+    Far seen in Greek, deep men o' letters,
+    Hae thought they had ensured their debtors,
+              A' future ages;
+    Now moths deform in shapeless tatters
+              Their unknown pages."'
+
+The works of such scholars enjoyed of the moths! There is gentle satire
+here. They themselves had grubbed on Greek, and now is Time avenged.
+
+It is in his epistles that we see Burns most vividly and clearly, the
+man in all his moods. They are just such letters as might be written to
+intimate friends when one is not afraid of being himself, and can speak
+freely. In sentiment they are candid and sincere, and in language
+transparently unaffected. Whatever occurs to him as he writes goes down;
+we have the thoughts of his heart at the time of writing, and see the
+varying expressions of his face as he passes from grave to gay, from
+lively to severe. Now he is tender, now indignant; now rattling along in
+good-natured raillery without broadening into burlesque; now becoming
+serious and pensively philosophic without a suggestion of mawkish
+morality. For Burns, when he is himself, is always an artist; says his
+say, and lets the moral take care of itself; and in his epistles he lets
+himself go in a very revelry of artistic abandon. He does not think of
+style--that fetich of barren minds--and style comes to him; for style is
+a coquette that flies the suppliant wooer to kiss the feet of him who
+worships a goddess; a submissive handmaiden, a wayward and moody
+mistress. But along with delicacy of diction, force and felicity of
+expression, pregnancy of phrase and pliancy of language, what knowledge
+there is of men--the passions that sway, the impulses that prompt, the
+motives that move them to action. Clearness of vision and accuracy of
+observation are evidenced in their vividness of imagery; naturalness and
+truthfulness--the first essential of all good writing--in their
+convincing sincerity of sentiment. Wit and humour, play and sparkle of
+fancy, satire genial or scathing, a boundless love of nature and all
+created things, are harmoniously unified in the glowing imagination of
+the poet, and welded into the perfect poem. Behind all is the
+personality of the writer, captivating the reader as much by his
+kindliness and sympathy as by his witchery of words. Others have
+attempted poetic epistles, but none has touched familiar intercourse to
+such fine issues; none has written with such natural grace or woven the
+warp and woof of word and sentiment so cunningly into the web of poetry
+as Robert Burns. Looseness of rhythm may be detected, excruciating
+rhymes are not awanting, but all are forgiven and forgotten in the
+enjoyment of the feast as a whole.
+
+Besides the satires and epistles we have during this fertile period
+poems as different in subject, sentiment, and treatment as _The Cotter's
+Saturday Night_ and _The Jolly Beggars_; _Hallowe'en_ and _The Mountain
+Daisy_; _The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare Maggie_ and _The Twa
+Dogs_; _Address to a Mouse_, _Man was made to Mourn_, _The Vision_, _A
+Winter's Night_, and _The Epistle to a Young Friend_. Perhaps of all
+these poems _The Vision_ is the most important. It is an epoch-marking
+poem in the poet's life. All that he had previously written had been
+leading to this; the finer the poem the more surely was it bringing him
+to this composition. The time was bound to come when he had to settle
+for himself finally and firmly what his work in life was to be. Was
+poetry to be merely a pastime; a recreation after the labours of the day
+were done; a solace when harvests failed and ruin stared the family in
+the face? That question Burns answered when he sat down by the
+ingle-cheek, and, looking backward, mused on the years of youth that had
+been spent 'in stringing blethers up in rhyme for fools to sing.' He saw
+what he might have been; he knew too well what he was--'half-mad,
+half-fed, half-sarket.' Yet the picture of what he might have been he
+dismissed lightly, almost disdainfully; for he saw what he might be
+yet--what he should be. Turning from the toilsome past and the
+unpromising present, he looked to the future with a manly assurance of
+better things. He should shine in his humble sphere, a rustic bard; his
+to
+
+    'Preserve the dignity of Man,
+              With soul erect;
+    And trust, the Universal Plan
+              Will all protect.'
+
+The poem is pitched on a high key; the keynote is struck in the opening
+lines, and the verses move to the end with stateliness and dignity. It
+is calm, contemplative, with that artistic restraint that comes of
+conscious power. Burns took himself seriously, and knew that if he were
+true to his genius he would become the poet and prophet of his
+fellow-men.
+
+It is worth while dwelling a little on this particular poem, because it
+marks a crisis in Burns's life. At this point he shook himself free from
+the tyranny of the soil. He had considered all things, and his
+resolution for authorship was taken. Some of the other poems will be
+mentioned afterwards; meantime we have to consider another crisis in his
+life--some aspects of his nature less pleasing, some episodes in his
+career dark and unlovely.
+
+Speaking of the effect _Holy Willie's Prayer_ had on the kirk-session,
+he says that they actually held three meetings to see if their holy
+artillery could be pointed against profane rhymers. 'Unluckily for me,'
+he adds, 'my idle wanderings led me on another side, point-blank within
+reach of their heaviest metal. This is the unfortunate story alluded to
+in my printed poem _The Lament_. 'Twas a shocking affair, which I cannot
+yet bear to recollect, and it had very nearly given me one or two of the
+principal qualifications for a place with those who have lost the chart
+and mistaken the reckoning of rationality.'
+
+Throughout the year 1785 Burns had been acquainted with Jean Armour, the
+daughter of a master mason in Mauchline. Her name, besides being
+mentioned in his _Epistle to Davie_, is mentioned in _The Vision_, and
+we know from a verse on the six belles of Mauchline that 'Armour was the
+jewel o' them a'.' From the depressing cares and anxieties of that
+gloomy season the poet had turned to seek solace in song, but he had
+also found comfort and consolation in love.
+
+    'When heart-corroding care and grief
+      Deprive my soul of rest,
+    Her dear idea brings relief
+      And solace to my breast.'
+
+Now in the spring of 1786 Burns as a man of honour must acknowledge Jean
+as his wife. The lovers had imprudently anticipated the Church's
+sanction to marriage, and it was his duty, speaking in the homely phrase
+of the Scottish peasantry, to make an honest woman of his Bonnie Jean.
+But, unfortunately, matters had been going from bad to worse on the farm
+of Mossgiel, and about this time the brothers had come to a final
+decision to quit the farm. Robert, as Gilbert informs us, durst not then
+engage with a family in his poor, unsettled state, but was anxious to
+shield his partner by every means in his power from the consequences of
+their imprudence. It was agreed, therefore, between them, that they
+should make a legal acknowledgment of marriage, that he should go to
+Jamaica to push his fortune, and that she should remain with her father
+till it should please Providence to put the means of supporting a family
+in his power. He was willing even to work as a common labourer so that
+he might do his duty by the woman he had already made his wife. But
+Jean's father, whatever were his reasons, would allow her to have
+nothing whatever to do with a man like Burns. A husband in Jamaica was,
+in his judgment, no husband at all. What inducement he held out, or what
+arguments he used, we may not know, but he prevailed on Jean to
+surrender to him the paper acknowledging the irregular marriage. This he
+deposited with Mr. Aitken of Ayr, who, as Burns heard, deleted the
+names, thus rendering the marriage null and void. This was the
+circumstance, what he regarded as Jean's desertion, which brought Burns,
+as he has said, to the verge of insanity.
+
+Now it was that he finally resolved to leave the country. It was not the
+first time he had thought of America. Poverty, before this, had led him
+to think of emigrating; the success of others who had gone out as
+settlers tempted him to try his fortune beyond the seas, even though he
+'should herd the buckskin kye in Virginia.' Now, imprudence as well as
+poverty urged him, while, wounded so sorely by the action of the
+Armours both in his love and his vanity, he had little desire to remain
+at home. There is no doubt that, prior to the birth of his twin children
+and the publication of his poems, he would have quitted Scotland with
+little reluctance. But he was so poor that, even after accepting a
+situation in Jamaica, he had not money to pay his passage; and it was at
+the suggestion of Gavin Hamilton that he began seriously to prepare for
+the publication of his poems by subscription, in order to raise a sum
+sufficient to buy his banishment. Accordingly we find him under the date
+April 3, 1786, writing to Mr. Aitken, 'My proposals for publishing I am
+just going to send to press.'
+
+But what a time this was in the poet's life! It was a long tumult of
+hope and despair, exultation and despondency, poetry and love; revelry,
+rebellion, and remorse. Everything was excitement; calmness itself a
+fever. Yet through it all inspiration was ever with him, and poem
+followed poem with miraculous, one might almost say, unnatural rapidity.
+Now he is apostrophising Ruin; now he is wallowing in the mire of
+village scandal; now he is addressing a mountain daisy in words of
+tenderness and purity; now he is scarifying a garrulous tailor, and
+ranting with an alien flippancy; now it is Beelzebub he addresses, now
+the King; now he is waxing eloquent on the virtues of Scotch whisky,
+anon writing to a young friend in words of wisdom that might well be
+written on the fly-leaf of his Bible.
+
+This was certainly a period of ageing activity in Burns's life. It
+seemed as if there had been a conspiracy of fate and circumstance to
+herald the birth of his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and
+travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of a play that had all
+the makings of a farce and all the elements of a tragedy. There were
+endless complications and daily developments, all deepening the dramatic
+intensity without disturbing the unity. We watch with breathless
+interest, dumbly wondering what the end will be. It is tragedy, comedy,
+melodrama, and burlesque all in one.
+
+Driven almost to madness by the faithlessness of Jean Armour, he rends
+himself in a whirlwind of passion, and seeks sympathy and solace in the
+love of Mary Campbell. What a situation for a novelist! This is just how
+the story-teller would have made his jilted hero act; sent him with
+bleeding heart to seek consolation in a new love. For novelists make a
+study of the vagaries of love, and know that hearts are caught in the
+rebound.
+
+Most of the biographers of Burns are agreed that this Highland lassie
+was the object of by far the deepest passion he ever knew. They may be
+right. Death stepped in before disillusion, and she was never other than
+the adored Mary of that rapturous meeting when the white
+hawthorn-blossom no purer was than their love. Thus was his love for
+Mary Campbell ever a holy and spiritual devotion. Auguste Angellier
+says: 'This was the purest, the most lasting, and by far the noblest of
+his loves. Above all the others, many of which were more passionate,
+this one stands out with the chasteness of a lily. There is a complete
+contrast between his love for Jean and his love for Mary. In the one
+case all the epithets are material; here they are all moral. The praises
+are borrowed, not from the graces of the body, but from the features of
+the soul. The words which occur again and again are those of honour, of
+purity, of goodness. The idea of seeing her again some day was never
+absent from his mind. Every time he thought of eternity, of a future
+life, of reunions in some unknown state, it was to her that his heart
+went out. The love of that second Sunday of May was ever present. It was
+the love which led Burns to the most elevated sphere to which he ever
+attained; it was the inspiration of his most spiritual efforts. This
+sweet, blue-eyed Highland lassie was his Beatrice, and waved to him from
+the gates of heaven.'
+
+We know little about Mary Campbell from the poet himself; and though
+much has been ferreted out about her by a host of snappers-up of
+unconsidered trifles, this episode in his life is still involved in
+mystery. It is pleasant to reflect that his reticence here has kept at
+least one love passage in his life sacred and holy. Is not mystery half
+the charm and beauty of love? Yet, in spite of his silence, or probably
+because of it, details have been raked up from time to time, some grey
+and colourless fossil-remains of what was once fresh and living fact.
+From Burns himself we know that the lovers took a tender farewell in a
+sequestered spot by the banks of the Ayr, and parted never to meet
+again. All the romance and tragedy are there, and what need we more? We
+are not even certain as to either the place or the date of her death.
+Mrs. Begg, the poet's sister, knew little or nothing about Mary
+Campbell. She remembered, however, a letter being handed in to him
+after the work of the season was over. 'He went to the window to open
+and read it, and she was struck by the look of agony which was the
+consequence. He went out without uttering a word.' What he felt he
+expressed afterwards in song--song that has become the language of
+bereaved and broken hearts for all time. The widowed lover knows 'the
+dear departed shade,' but he may not have heard of Mary Campbell.
+
+It was in May that Burns and Highland Mary had parted; in June he wrote
+to a friend about ungrateful Armour, confessing that he still loved her
+to distraction, though he would not tell her so. But all his letters
+about this time are wild and rebellious. He raves in a tempest of
+passion, and cools himself again, perhaps in the composition of a song
+or poem. Just about the time this letter was written, his poems were
+already in the press. His proposal for publishing had met with so hearty
+a reception, that success financially was to a certain extent assured,
+and the printing had been put into the hand of John Wilson, Kilmarnock.
+Even yet his pen was busy. He wrote often in a gay and lively style,
+almost, it would seem, in a struggle to keep himself from sinking into
+melancholy, 'singing to keep his courage up.' His gaiety was 'the
+madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner.'
+_A Bard's Epitaph_, however, among the many pieces of this season, is
+earnest and serious enough to disarm hostile criticism; and his loose
+and flippant productions are read leniently in the light of this
+pathetic confession. It is a self-revelation truly, but it is honest,
+straightforward, and manly. There is nothing plaintive or mawkish about
+it.
+
+We next find Burns flying from home to escape legal measures that Jean
+Armour's father was instituting against him. He was in hiding at
+Kilmarnock to be out of the way of legal diligence, and it was in such
+circumstances that he saw his poems through the press. Surely never
+before in the history of literature had book burst from such a medley of
+misfortunes into so sudden and certain fame. Born in tumult, it
+vindicated its volcanic birth, and took the hearts of men by storm.
+Burns says little about those months of labour and bitterness. We know
+that he had then nearly as high an idea of himself and his works as he
+had in later life; he had watched every means of information as to how
+much ground he occupied as a man and a poet, and was sure his poems
+would meet with some applause. He had subscriptions for about three
+hundred and fifty, and he got six hundred copies printed, pocketing,
+after all expenses were paid, nearly twenty pounds. With nine guineas of
+this sum he bespoke a passage in the first ship that was to sail for the
+West Indies. 'I had for some time,' he says, 'been skulking from covert
+to covert under all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised,
+ungrateful people had uncoupled the merciless, legal pack at my heels. I
+had taken the last farewell of my friends; my chest was on the road to
+Greenock; I had composed the song _The Gloomy Night is Gathering Fast_,
+which was to be the last effort of my muse in Caledonia, when a letter
+from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by
+rousing my poetic ambition. The doctor belonged to a class of critics,
+for whose applause I had not even dared to hope. His idea that I would
+meet with every encouragement for a second edition fired me so much,
+that away I posted to Edinburgh, without a single acquaintance in town,
+or a single letter of recommendation in my pocket.'
+
+It was towards the end of July that the poems were published, and they
+met with a success that must have been gratifying to those friends who
+had stood by the poet in his hour of adversity, and done what they could
+to ensure subscriptions. In spite of the fact that Burns certainly
+looked upon himself as possessed of some poetic abilities, the reception
+the little volume met with, and the impression it at once made, must
+have exceeded his wildest anticipations. Even yet, however, he did not
+relinquish the idea of going to America. On the other hand, as we have
+seen, the first use he made of the money which publication had brought
+him, was to secure a berth in a vessel bound for Jamaica. But he was
+still compelled by the dramatic uncertainty of circumstance. The day of
+sailing was postponed, else had he certainly left his native land. It
+was only after Jean Armour had become the mother of twin children that
+there was any hint of diffidence about sailing. In a letter to Robert
+Aitken, written in October, he says: 'All these reasons urge me to go
+abroad, and to all these reasons I have one answer--the feelings of a
+father. That in the present mood I am in overbalances everything that
+can be laid in the scale against it.'
+
+His friends, too, after the success of his poems, were beginning to be
+doubtful about the wisdom of his going abroad, and were doing what they
+could to secure for him a place in the Excise. For his fame had gone
+beyond the bounds of his native county, and others than people in his
+own station had recognised his genius. Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop was one of
+the first to seek the poet's acquaintance, and she became an almost
+lifelong friend; through his poems he renewed acquaintance with Mrs.
+Stewart of Stair. He was 'roosed' by Craigen-Gillan; Dugald Stewart, the
+celebrated metaphysician, and one of the best-known names in the learned
+and literary circles of Edinburgh, who happened to be spending his
+vacation at Catrine, not very far from Mossgiel, invited the poet to
+dine with him, and on that occasion he 'dinnered wi' a laird'--Lord
+Daer. Then came the appreciative letter from Dr. Blacklock to the Rev.
+George Lawrie of Loudon, already mentioned. Even this letter might not
+have proved strong enough to detain him in Scotland, had it not been
+that he was disappointed of a second edition of his poems in Kilmarnock.
+Other encouragement came from Edinburgh in a very favourable criticism
+of his poems in the _Edinburgh Magazine_. This, taken along with Dr.
+Blacklock's suggestion about 'a second edition more numerous than the
+former,' led the poet to believe that his work would be taken up by any
+of the Edinburgh publishers. The feelings of a father also urged him to
+remain in Scotland; and at length--probably in November--the thought of
+exile was abandoned. It was with very different feelings, we may be
+sure, that he contemplated setting out from Mossgiel to sojourn for a
+season in Edinburgh--a name that had ever been associated in his mind
+with the best traditions of learning and literature in Scotland.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE EDINBURGH EDITION
+
+
+Edinburgh towards the close of last century was a very different place
+from Edinburgh of the present day. It was then to a certain extent the
+hub of Scottish society; the centre of learning and literature; the
+winter rendezvous of not a few of the nobility and gentry of Scotland.
+For in those days it had its society and its season; county families had
+not altogether abandoned the custom of keeping their houses in town. All
+roads did not then lead to London as they do now, when Edinburgh is a
+capital in little more than name, and its prestige has become a
+tradition. A century ago Edinburgh had all the glamour and fascination
+of the capital of a no mean country; to-day it is but the historical
+capital invested with the glamour and fascination of a departed glory.
+The very names of those whom Burns met on his first visit to Edinburgh
+are part of the history of the nation. In the University there were at
+that time, representative of the learning of the age, Dugald Stewart,
+Dr. Blair, and Dr. Robertson. David Hume was but recently dead, and the
+lustre of his name remained. His great friend, Adam Smith, author of
+_The Wealth of Nations_, was still living; while Henry Mackenzie, _The
+Man of Feeling_, the most popular writer of his day, was editing _The
+Lounger_; and Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, was also a name of
+authority in the world of letters. Nor was the Bar, whose magnates have
+ever figured in the front rank of Edinburgh society, eclipsed by the
+literary luminaries of the University. Lord Monboddo has left a name,
+which his countrymen are not likely to forget. He was an accomplished,
+though eccentric character, whose classical bent was in the direction of
+Epicurean parties. His great desire was to revive the traditions of the
+elegant suppers of classical times. Not only were music and painting
+employed to this end, but the tables were wreathed with flowers, the
+odour of incense pervaded the room; the wines were of the choicest,
+served from decanters of Grecian design. But, perhaps, the chief
+attraction to Burns in the midst of all this super-refinement was the
+presence of 'the heavenly Miss Burnet,' daughter of Lord Monboddo.
+'There has not been anything nearly like her,' he wrote to his friend
+Chalmers, 'in all the combinations of beauty and grace and goodness the
+great Creator has formed since Milton's Eve in the first day of her
+existence.' The Hon. Henry Erskine was another well-known name, not only
+in legal circles, but as well in fashionable society. His genial and
+sunny nature made him so great a favourite in his profession, that
+having been elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1786, he was
+unanimously re-elected every year till 1796, when he was victorious over
+Dundas of Arniston, who had been brought forward in opposition to him.
+The leader of fashion was the celebrated Duchess of Gordon, who was
+never absent from a public place, and 'the later the hour so much the
+better.' Her amusements--her life, we might say--were dancing, cards,
+and company. With such a leader, the season to the very select and
+elegant society of Edinburgh was certain to be a time of brilliance and
+gaiety; while its very exclusiveness, and the fact that it affected or
+reflected the literary life of the University and the Bar, would make it
+all the more ready to lionise a man like Burns when the opportunity
+came.
+
+The members of the middle class caught their tone from the upper ranks,
+and took their nightly sederunts and morning headaches as privileges
+they dared aristocratic exclusiveness to deny them. Douce citizens,
+merchants, respectable tradesmen, well-to-do lawyers, forgathered when
+the labours of the day were done to spend a few hours in some snug
+back-parlour, where mine host granted them the privileges and privacy of
+a club. Such social beings as these, met to discuss punch, law, and
+literature, were no less likely than their aristocratic neighbours to
+receive Burns with open arms, and once he was in their midst to prolong
+their sittings in his honour. Nor was Burns, if he found them honest and
+hearty fellows, the man to say them nay. He was eminently a social and
+sociable being, and in company such as theirs he could unbend himself as
+he might not do in the houses of punctilious society. The etiquette of
+that howff of the Crochallan Fencibles in the Anchor Close or of Johnnie
+Dowie's tavern in Libberton's Wynd was not the etiquette of
+drawing-rooms; and the poet was free to enliven the hours with a
+rattling fire of witty remarks on men and things as he had been wont to
+do on the bog at Lochlea, with only a few noteless peasants for
+audience.
+
+Burns entered Edinburgh on November 28, 1786. He had spent the night
+after leaving Mossgiel at the farm of Covington Mains, where the
+kind-hearted host, Mr. Prentice, had all the farmers of the parish
+gathered to meet him. This is of interest as showing the popularity
+Burns's poems had already won; while the eagerness of those farmers to
+see and know the man after they had read his poems proves most
+strikingly how straight the poet had gone to the hearts of his readers.
+They had recognised the voice of a human being, and heard it gladly.
+This gathering was convincing testimony, if such were needed, of the
+truthfulness and sincerity of his writings. No doubt Burns, with his
+great force of understanding, appreciated the welcome of those
+brother-farmers, and valued it above the adulation he afterwards
+received in Edinburgh. The Kilmarnock Edition was but a few months old,
+yet here was a gathering of hard-working men, who had read his poems, we
+may be sure, from cover to cover, and now they were eager to thank him
+who had sung the joys and sorrows of their workaday lives. Of course
+there was a great banquet, and night wore into morning before the
+company dispersed. They had seen the poet face to face, and the man was
+greater than his poems.
+
+Next morning he resumed his journey, breakfasting at Carnwath, and
+reaching Edinburgh in the evening. He had come, as he tells us, without
+a letter of introduction in his pocket, and he took up his abode with
+John Richmond in Baxter's Close, off the Lawnmarket. He had known
+Richmond when he was a clerk with Gavin Hamilton, and had kept up a
+correspondence with him ever since he had left Mauchline. The lodging
+was a humble enough one, the rent being only three shillings a week;
+but here Burns lodged all the time he was in Edinburgh, and it was
+hither he returned from visiting the houses of the rich and great, to
+share a bed with his friend and companion of many a merry meeting at
+Mauchline.
+
+It would be vain to attempt to describe Burns's feelings during those
+first few days in Edinburgh. He had never before been in a larger town
+than Kilmarnock or Ayr; and now he walked the streets of Scotland's
+capital, to him full of history and instinct with the associations of
+centuries. This was really the heart of Scotland, the home of heroes who
+fought and fell for their country, 'the abode of kings of other years.'
+His sentimental attachment to Jacobitism became more pronounced as he
+looked on Holyrood. For Burns, a representative of the strength and
+weakness of his countrymen, was no less representative of Scotland's
+sons in his chivalrous pity for the fate of Queen Mary and his romantic
+loyalty to the gallant Prince Charlie. His poetical espousal of the
+cause of the luckless Stuarts was purely a matter of sentiment, a kind
+of pious pity that had little to do with reason; and in this he was
+typical of his countrymen even of the present day, who are loyal to the
+house of Stuart in song, and in life are loyal subjects of their Queen.
+
+We are told, and we can well believe that for the first few days of his
+stay he wandered about, looking down from Arthur's Seat, gazing at the
+Castle, or contemplating the windows of the booksellers' shops. We know
+that he made a special pilgrimage to the grave of Fergusson, and that in
+a letter, dated February 6, 1787, he applied to the honourable bailies
+of Canongate, Edinburgh, for permission 'to lay a simple stone over his
+revered ashes'; which petition was duly considered and graciously
+granted. The stone was afterwards erected, with the simple inscription,
+'Here lies Robert Fergusson, Poet. Born September 5th, 1751; died 16th
+October, 1774.
+
+    No sculptured marble here, nor pompous lay,
+      "No storied urn nor animated bust";
+    This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way
+      To pour her sorrow o'er her poet's dust.'
+
+On the reverse side is recorded the fact that the stone was erected by
+Robert Burns, and that the ground was to remain for ever sacred to the
+memory of Robert Fergusson.
+
+It is related, too, that he visited Ramsay's house, and that he bared
+his head when he entered. Burns over and over again, both in prose and
+verse, turned to these two names with a kind of fetich worship, that it
+is difficult to understand. He must have known that, as a poet, he was
+immeasurably superior to both. It may have been that their writings
+first opened his eyes to the possibilities of the Scots tongue in
+lyrical and descriptive poetry; and there was something also which
+appealed to him in the wretched life of Fergusson.
+
+    'O thou, my elder brother in misfortune,
+    By far my elder brother in the Muses.'
+
+His elder brother indeed by some six years! But there is more of
+reverence than sound judgment in his estimate of either Ramsay or
+Fergusson.
+
+Burns, however, had come to Edinburgh with a fixed purpose in view, and
+it would not do to waste his time mooning about the streets. On December
+7 we find him writing to Gavin Hamilton, half seriously, half jokingly:
+'I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John
+Bunyan, and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among
+the wonderful events in the Poor Robins' and Aberdeen Almanacs along
+with the Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge. My Lord
+Glencairn and the Dean of Faculty, Mr. H. Erskine, have taken me under
+their wing, and by all probability I shall soon be the tenth worthy and
+the eighth wise man of the world. Through my lord's influence it is
+inserted in the records of the Caledonian Hunt that they universally one
+and all subscribe for the second edition.'
+
+This letter shows that Burns had already been taken up, as the phrase
+goes, by the elite of Edinburgh; and it shows also and quite as clearly
+in the tone of quiet banter, that he was little likely to lose his head
+by the notice taken of him. To the Earl of Glencairn, mentioned in it,
+he had been introduced probably by Mr. Dalrymple of Orangefield, whom he
+knew both as a brother-mason and a brother-poet. The Earl had already
+seen the Kilmarnock Edition of the poems, and now he not only introduced
+Burns to William Creech, the leading publisher in Edinburgh, but he got
+the members of the Caledonian Hunt to become subscribers for a second
+edition of the poems. To Erskine he had been introduced at a meeting of
+the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge of Freemasons; and assuredly there was no
+man living more likely to exert himself in the interests of a genius
+like Burns.
+
+Two days after this letter to Gavin Hamilton there appeared in _The
+Lounger_ Mackenzie's appreciative notice of the Kilmarnock Edition. This
+notice has become historical, and at the time of its appearance it must
+have been peculiarly gratifying to Burns. He had remarked before, in
+reference to the letter from Dr. Blacklock, that the doctor belonged to
+a class of critics for whose applause he had not even dared to hope. Now
+his work was criticised most favourably by the one who was regarded as
+the highest authority on literature in Scotland. If a writer was praised
+in _The Lounger_, his fame was assured. He went into the world with the
+hall-mark of Henry Mackenzie; and what more was needed? The oracle had
+spoken, and his decision was final. His pronouncement would be echoed
+and re-echoed from end to end of the country. And this great critic
+claimed no special indulgence for Burns on the plea of his mean birth or
+poor education. He saw in this heaven-taught ploughman a genius of no
+ordinary rank, a man who possessed the spirit as well as the fancy of a
+great poet. He was a poet, and it mattered not whether he had been born
+a peasant or a peer. 'His poetry, considered abstractedly and without
+the apologies arising from his situation, seems to me fully entitled to
+command our feelings and obtain our applause.... The power of genius is
+not less admirable in tracing the manners, than in painting the passions
+or in drawing the scenery of nature. That intuitive glance with which a
+writer like Shakspeare discerns the character of men, with which he
+catches the many changing hues of life, forms a sort of problem in the
+science of mind, of which it is easier to see the truth than assign the
+cause.'
+
+But Mackenzie did more than praise. He pointed out the fact that the
+author had had a terrible struggle with poverty all the days of his
+life, and made an appeal to his country 'to stretch out her hand and
+retain the native poet whose wood-notes wild possessed so much
+excellence.' There seems little doubt that the concluding words of this
+notice led Burns for the first time to hope and believe that, through
+some influential patron, he might be placed in a position to face the
+future without a fear, and to cultivate poetry at his leisure. There is
+no mistaking the meaning of Mackenzie's words, and he had evidently used
+them with the conviction that something would be done for Burns.
+Unfortunately, he was mistaken; the poet, at first misled, was slowly
+disillusioned and somewhat embittered. 'To repair the wrongs of
+suffering or neglected merit; to call forth genius from the obscurity
+where it had pined indignant, and place it where it may profit or
+delight the world--these are exertions which give to wealth an enviable
+superiority, to greatness and to patronage a laudable pride.'
+
+To Burns, at the time, such a criticism as this must have been all the
+more pleasing, inasmuch as it was the verdict of a man whose best-known
+work had been one of the poet's favourite books. We can easily imagine
+that, under the patronage of Lord Glencairn and Henry Erskine, and after
+Mackenzie's generous recognition of his genius, the doors of the best
+houses in Edinburgh would be open to him. His letter to John Ballantine,
+Ayr, written a few days after this criticism appeared, shows in what
+circles the poet was then moving. 'I have been introduced to a good many
+of the _noblesse_, but my avowed patrons and patronesses are, the
+Duchess of Gordon, the Countess of Glencairn with my Lord and Lady
+Betty, the Dean of Faculty, Sir John Whitefoord. I have likewise warm
+friends among the _literati_; Professors Stewart, Blair, and Mr.
+Mackenzie, _The Man of Feeling_.... I am nearly agreed with Creech to
+print my book, and I suppose I will begin on Monday.... Dugald Stewart
+and some of my learned friends put me in a periodical called _The
+Lounger_, a copy of which I here enclose you. I was, Sir, when I was
+first honoured with your notice, too obscure; now I tremble lest I
+should be ruined by being dragged too suddenly into the glare of learned
+and polite observation.'
+
+Burns was now indeed the lion of Edinburgh. It must have been a great
+change for a man to have come straight from the stilts of the plough to
+be dined and toasted by such men as Lord Glencairn, Lord Monboddo, and
+the Hon. Henry Erskine; to be feted and flattered by the Duchess of
+Gordon, the Countess of Glencairn, and Lady Betty Cunningham; to count
+amongst his friends Mr. Mackenzie and Professors Stewart and Blair. It
+would have been little wonder if his head had been turned by the
+patronage of the nobility, the deference and attention of the literary
+and learned coteries of Edinburgh. But Burns was too sensible to be
+carried away by the adulation of a season. A man of his keenness of
+penetration and clearness of insight would appreciate the praise of the
+world at its proper value. He bore himself with becoming dignity, taking
+his place in refined society as one who had a right there, without
+showing himself either conceitedly aggressive or meanly servile. He took
+his part in conversation, but no more than his part, and expressed
+himself with freedom and decision. His conversation, in fact, astonished
+the _literati_ even more than his poems had done. Perhaps they had
+expected some uncouth individual who would stammer crop-and-weather
+commonplaces in a rugged vernacular, or, worse still, in ungrammatical
+English; but here was one who held his own with them in speculative
+discussion, speaking not only with the eloquence of a poet, but with the
+readiness, clearness, and fluency of a man of letters. His pure English
+diction astonished them, but his acuteness of reasoning, his intuitive
+knowledge of men and the world, was altogether beyond their
+comprehension. All they had got by years of laborious study this man
+appeared to have as a natural gift. In repartee, even, he could more
+than hold his own with them, and in the presence of ladies could turn a
+compliment with the best. 'It needs no effort of imagination,' says
+Lockhart, 'to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of
+scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) must have been in
+the presence of this big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, who,
+having forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a single
+stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation a
+most thorough conviction that in the society of the most eminent men of
+his nation he was exactly where he was entitled to be.' It was a new
+world to Burns, yet he walked about as if he were of old familiar with
+its ways; he conducted himself in society like one to the manner born.
+
+All who have left written evidence of Burns's visit to Edinburgh are
+agreed that he conducted himself with manliness and dignity, and all
+have left record of the powerful impression his conversation made on
+them. His poems were wonderful; himself was greater than his poems, a
+giant in intellect. A ploughman who actually dared to have formed a
+distinct conception of the doctrine of _association_ was a miracle
+before which schools and scholars were dumb. 'Nothing, perhaps,' Dugald
+Stewart wrote, 'was more remarkable among his various attainments than
+the fluency, precision, and originality of his language when he spoke in
+company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of
+expression, and avoided more successfully than most Scotchmen the
+peculiarities of Scottish phraseology.'
+
+And Professor Stewart goes further than this when he speaks of the
+soundness and sanity of Burns's nature. 'The attentions he received
+during his stay in town from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were
+such as would have turned any head but his own. He retained the same
+simplicity of manner and appearance which had struck me so forcibly when
+I first saw him in the country; nor did he seem to feel any additional
+self-importance from the number and rank of his new acquaintance. His
+dress was perfectly suited to his station, plain and unpretentious, with
+a sufficient attention to neatness.' Principal Robertson has left it on
+record, that he had scarcely ever met with any man whose conversation
+displayed greater vigour than that of Burns. Walter Scott, a youth of
+some sixteen years at the time, met Burns at the house of Dr. Adam
+Ferguson, and was particularly struck with his poetic eye, 'which
+literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest,' and with his
+forcible conversation. 'Among the men who were the most learned of their
+time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but
+without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in
+opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, and at the same time
+with modesty.... I never saw a man in company more perfectly free from
+either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment.' To these may be
+added the testimony of Dr. Walker, who gives, perhaps, the most complete
+and convincing picture of the man at this time. He insists on the same
+outstanding characteristics in Burns, his innate dignity, his unaffected
+demeanour in company, and brilliancy in conversation. In no part of his
+manner, we read, was there the slightest degree of affectation, and no
+one could have guessed from his behaviour or conversation, that he had
+been for some months the favourite of all the fashionable circles of a
+metropolis. 'In conversation he was powerful. His conceptions and
+expression were of corresponding vigour, and on all subjects were as
+remote as possible from commonplace.'
+
+But whilst ladies of rank and fashion were deluging this Ayrshire
+ploughman with invitations, and vying one with another in their
+patronage and worship, the mind of the poet was no less busy registering
+impressions of every new experience. If the learned men of Edinburgh set
+themselves to study the character of a genius who upset all their
+cherished theories of birth and education, and to chronicle his sayings
+and doings, Burns at the same time was studying them, gauging their
+powers intuitively, telling their limitations at a glance. For he must
+measure every man he met, and himself with him. His standard was always
+the same; every brain was weighed against his own; but with Burns this
+was never more than a comparison of capacities. He took his stand, not
+by what work he had done, but by what he felt he was capable of doing.
+And that is not, and cannot be, the way of the world. In all his letters
+at this time we see him studying himself in the circles of fashion and
+learning. He could look on Robert Burns, as he were another person,
+brought from the plough and set down in a world of wealth and
+refinement, of learning and wit and beauty. He saw the dangers that
+beset him, and the temptations to which he was exposed; he recognised
+that something more than his poetic abilities was needed to explain his
+sudden popularity. He was the vogue, the favourite of a season; but
+public favour was capricious, and next year the doors of the great might
+be closed against him; while patrician dames who had schemed for his
+smiles might glance at him with indifferent eyes as at a dismissed
+servant once high in favour. His letter to Mrs. Dunlop, dated January
+15, may be taken as a just, deliberate, and clear expression of his
+views of himself and society at this time. The letter is so quietly
+dignified that we may quote at some length. 'You are afraid I shall grow
+intoxicated with my prosperity as a poet. Alas! madam, I know myself and
+the world too well. I do not mean any airs of affected modesty; I am
+willing to believe that my abilities deserve some notice, but in a most
+enlightened, informed age and nation, where poetry is and has been the
+study of men of the first natural genius, aided with all the powers of
+polite learning, polite books, and polite company--to be dragged forth
+to the full glare of learned and polite observation, with all my
+imperfections of awkward rusticity and crude and unpolished ideas on my
+head--I assure you, madam, I do not dissemble when I tell you I tremble
+for the consequences. The novelty of a poet in my obscure situation,
+without any of those advantages that are reckoned necessary for that
+character, at least at this time of day, has raised a partial tide of
+public notice which has borne me to a height where I am absolutely,
+feelingly certain my abilities are inadequate to support me; and too
+surely do I see that time when the same tide will leave me and recede,
+perhaps as far below the mark of truth. I do not say this in the
+ridiculous affectation of self-abasement and modesty. I have studied
+myself, and know what ground I occupy; and however a friend or the world
+may differ from me in that particular, I stand for my own opinion in
+silent resolve, with all the tenaciousness of property. I mention this
+to you once for all to disburden my mind, and I do not wish to hear or
+say more about it. But--
+
+    "When proud fortune's ebbing tide recedes,"
+
+you will bear me witness that when my bubble of fame was at the highest,
+I stood unintoxicated with the inebriating cup in my hand, looking
+forward with rueful resolve to the hastening time when the blow of
+calamity should dash it to the ground with all the eagerness of vengeful
+triumph.'
+
+In a letter to Dr. Moore he harps on the same string, for he sees
+clearly enough that though his abilities as a poet are worthy of
+recognition, it is the novelty of his position and the strangeness of
+the life he has pictured in his poems that have brought him into polite
+notice. The field of his poetry, rather than the poetry itself, is the
+wonder in the eyes of stately society. To the Rev. Mr. Lawrie of Loudon
+he writes in a similar strain, and speaks even more emphatically. From
+all his letters, indeed, at this time we gather that he saw that
+novelty had much to do with his present eclat; that the tide of
+popularity would recede, and leave him at his leisure to descend to his
+former situation; and, above all, that he was prepared for this, come
+when it would.
+
+All this time he had been busy correcting the proofs of his poems; and
+now that he was already assured the edition would be a success, he began
+to think seriously of the future and of settling down again as farmer.
+The appellation of Scottish Bard, he confessed to Mrs. Dunlop, was his
+highest pride; to continue to deserve it, his most exalted ambition. He
+had no dearer aim than to be able to make 'leisurely pilgrimages through
+Caledonia, to sit on the fields of her battles, to wander on the
+romantic banks of her rivers, and to muse by the stately towers or
+venerable ruins, once the honoured abodes of her heroes.' But that was a
+Utopian dream; he had dallied long enough with life, and now it was time
+he should be in earnest. 'I have a fond, an aged mother to care for; and
+some other bosom ties perhaps equally tender.'
+
+Perhaps, had Burns received before he left Edinburgh the L500 which
+Creech ultimately paid him for the Edinburgh Edition, he might have gone
+straight to a farm in the south country, and taken up what he considered
+the serious business of life. He himself, about this time, estimated
+that he would clear nearly L300 by authorship, and with that sum he
+intended to return to farming. Mr. Miller of Dalswinton had expressed a
+wish to have Burns as tenant of one of his farms, and the poet had been
+already approached on the subject. We also gather from almost every
+letter written just before the publication of his poems, that he
+contemplated an immediate return 'to his shades.' However, when the
+Edinburgh Edition came out, April 21, 1787, the poet found that it would
+be a considerable time before the whole profits accruing from
+publication could be paid over to him. Indeed, there was certainly an
+unnecessary delay on Creech's part in making a settlement. The first
+instalment of profits was not sufficient for leasing and stocking a
+farm; and during the months that elapsed before the whole profits were
+in his hands, Burns made several tours through the Borders and Highlands
+of Scotland. This was certainly one of his dearest aims; but these tours
+were undertaken somewhat under compulsion, and we doubt not he would
+much more gladly have gone straight back to farm-life, and kept these
+leisurely pilgrimages to a more convenient season. One is not in a mood
+for dreaming on battlefields, or wandering in a reverie by romantic
+rivers, when the future is unsettled and life is for the time being
+without an aim. There is something of mystery and melancholy hanging
+about these peregrinations, and the cause, it seems to us, is not far to
+seek. These months are months of waiting and wearying; he is unsettled,
+oftentimes moody and despondent; his bursts of gaiety appear forced, and
+his muse is well-nigh barren. In the circumstances, no doubt it was the
+best thing he could do, to gratify his long-cherished desire of seeing
+these places in his native country, whose names were enshrined in song
+or story. But how much more pleasant--and more profitable both to the
+poet himself and the country he loved--had these journeys been made
+under more favourable conditions!
+
+The past also as much as the future weighed on the poet's mind. His
+days had been so fully occupied in Edinburgh that he had little leisure
+to think on some dark and dramatic episodes of Mauchline and Kilmarnock;
+but now in his wanderings he has time not only to think but to brood;
+and we may be sure the face of Bonnie Jean haunted him in dreams, and
+that his heart heard again and again the plaintive voices of little
+children. In several of his letters now we detect a tone of bitterness,
+in which we suspect there is more of remorse than of resentment with the
+world. He certainly was disappointed that Creech could not pay him in
+full, but he must have been gratified with the reception his poems had
+got. The list of subscribers ran to thirty-eight pages, and was
+representative of every class in Scotland. In the words of Cunningham:
+'All that coterie influence and individual exertion--all that the
+noblest and humblest could do, was done to aid in giving it a kind
+reception. Creech, too, had announced it through the booksellers of the
+land, and it was soon diffused over the country, over the colonies, and
+wherever the language was spoken. The literary men of the South seemed
+even to fly to a height beyond those of the North. Some hesitated not to
+call him the Northern Shakspeare.'
+
+This surely was a great achievement for one who, a few months
+previously, had been skulking from covert to covert to escape the
+terrors of a jail. He had hardly dared to hope for the commendation of
+the Edinburgh critics, yet he had been received by the best society of
+the capital; his genius had been recognised by the highest literary
+authorities of Scotland; and now the second edition of his poems was
+published under auspices that gave it the character of a national book.
+
+If the poems this volume contained established fully and finally the
+reputation of the poet, the subscription list was a no less substantial
+proof of a generous and enthusiastic appreciation of his genius on the
+part of his countrymen. And that Burns must have recognised. A man of
+his sound common sense could not have expected more.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BURNS'S TOURS
+
+
+The Edinburgh Edition having now been published, there was no reason for
+the poet to prolong his stay in the city. It was only after being
+disappointed of a second Kilmarnock Edition of his poems that he had
+come to try his fortunes in the capital; and now that his hopes of a
+fuller edition and a wider field had been realised, the purpose of his
+visit was accomplished, and there was no need to fritter his time away
+in idleness.
+
+In a letter to Lord Buchan, Burns had doubted the prudence of a
+penniless poet faring forth to see the sights of his native land. But
+circumstances have changed. With the assured prospect of the financial
+success of his second venture, he felt himself in a position to gratify
+the dearest wish of his heart and to fire his muse at Scottish story and
+Scottish scenes. Moreover, as has been said, it would be some time
+before Creech could come to a final settlement of accounts with the
+poet, and he may have deemed that the interval would be profitably spent
+in travel. His travelling companion on his first tour was a Mr. Robert
+Ainslie, a young gentleman of good education and some natural ability,
+with whom he left Edinburgh on the 5th May, a fortnight after the
+publication of his poems. We are told that the poet, just before he
+mounted his horse, received a letter from Dr. Blair, which, having
+partly read, he crumpled up and angrily thrust into his pocket. A
+perusal of the letter will explain, if it does not go far to justify,
+the poet's irritation. It is a sleek, superior production, with the tone
+of a temperance tract, and the stilted diction of a dominie. The doctor
+is in it one of those well-meaning, meddlesome men, lavish of academic
+advice. Burns resented moral prescriptions at all times--more especially
+from one whose knowledge of men was severely scholastic; and we can well
+imagine that he quitted Edinburgh in no amiable mood.
+
+From Edinburgh the two journeyed by the Lammermuirs to Berrywell, near
+Duns, where the Ainslie family lived. On the Sunday he attended church
+with the Ainslies, where the minister, Dr. Bowmaker, preached a sermon
+against obstinate sinners. 'I am found out,' the poet remarked,
+'wherever I go.' From Duns they proceeded to Coldstream, where, having
+crossed the Tweed, Burns first set foot on English ground. Here it was
+that, with bared head, he knelt and prayed for a blessing on Scotland,
+reciting with the deepest devotion the two concluding verses of _The
+Cotter's Saturday Night_.
+
+The next place visited was Kelso, where they admired the old abbey, and
+went to see Roxburgh Castle, thence to Jedburgh, where he met a Miss
+Hope and a Miss Lindsay, the latter of whom 'thawed his heart into
+melting pleasure after being so long frozen up in the Greenland Bay of
+indifference amid the noise and nonsense of Edinburgh.' When he left
+this romantic city his thoughts were not of the honour its citizens had
+done him, but of Jed's crystal stream and sylvan banks, and, above all,
+of Miss Lindsay, who brings him to the verge of verse. Thereafter he
+visited Kelso, Melrose, and Selkirk, and after spending about three
+weeks seeing all that was to be seen in this beautiful country-side, he
+set off with a Mr. Ker and a Mr. Hood on a visit to England. In this
+visit he went as far as Newcastle, returning by way of Hexham and
+Carlisle. After spending a day here he proceeded to Annan, and thence to
+Dumfries. Whilst in the Nithsdale district he took the opportunity of
+visiting Dalswinton and inspecting the unoccupied farms; but he did not
+immediately close with Mr. Miller's generous offer of a four-nineteen
+years' lease on his own terms. From Nithsdale he turned again to his
+native Ayrshire, arriving at Mossgiel in the beginning of June, after an
+absence from home of six eventful months.
+
+We can hardly imagine what this home-coming would be like. The Burnses
+were typical Scots in their undemonstrative ways; but this was a great
+occasion, and tradition has it that his mother allowed her feeling so
+far to overcome her natural reticence that she met him at the threshold
+with the exclamation, 'O Robert!' He had left home almost unknown, and
+had returned with a name that was known and honoured from end to end of
+his native land. He had left in the direst poverty, and haunted with the
+terrors of a jail, now he came back with his fortune assured; if not
+actually rich, at least with more money due to him than the family had
+ever dreamed of possessing. The mother's excess of feeling on such an
+occasion as this may be easily understood and excused.
+
+Of this Border tour Burns kept a scrappy journal, but he was more
+concerned in jotting down the names and characteristics of those with
+whom he forgathered than of letting himself out in snatches of song. He
+makes shrewd remarks by the way on farms and farming, on the washing and
+shearing of sheep, but the only verse he attempted was his _Epistle to
+Creech_. He who had longed to sit and muse on 'those once hard-contested
+fields' did not go out of his way to look on Ancrum Moor or Philiphaugh,
+nor do we read of him musing pensive in Yarrow.
+
+However, we are not to regard these days as altogether barren. The poet
+was gathering impressions which would come forth in song at some future
+time. 'Neither the fine scenery nor the lovely women,' Cunningham
+regrets, 'produced any serious effect on his muse.' This is a rash
+statement. Poets do not sow and reap at the same time--not even Burns.
+If his friends were disappointed at what they considered the sterility
+of his muse on this occasion, the fault did not lie with the poet, but
+with their absurd expectations. It may be as well to point out here that
+the greatest harm Edinburgh did to Burns was that it gathered round him
+a number of impatient and injudicious admirers who could not understand
+that poetry was not to be forced. The burst of poetry that practically
+filled the Kilmarnock Edition came after a seven years' growth of
+inspiration; but after his first visit to Edinburgh he was never allowed
+to rest. It was expected that he should write whenever a subject was
+suggested, or burst into verse at the first glimpse of a lovely
+landscape. Every friend was ready with advice as to how and what he
+should write, and quite as ready, the poet unfortunately knew, to
+criticise afterwards. The poetry of the Mossgiel period had come from
+him spontaneously. He had flung off impressions in verse fearlessly,
+without pausing to consider how his work would be appreciated by this
+one or denounced by that; and was true to himself. Now he knew that
+every verse he wrote would be read by many eyes, studied by many minds;
+some would scent heresy, others would spot Jacobitism, or worse,
+freedom; some would suspect his morality, others would deplore his Scots
+tongue; all would criticise favourably or adversely his poetic
+expression. It has to be kept in mind, too, that Burns at this time was
+in no mood for writing poetry. His mind was not at ease; and after his
+long spell of inspiration and the fatiguing distractions of Edinburgh,
+it was hardly to be wondered at that brain and body were alike in need
+of rest. The most natural rest would have been a return direct to the
+labours of the farm. That, however, was denied him, and the period of
+his journeyings was little else than a season of unsettlement and
+suspense.
+
+Burns only stayed a few days at home, and then set off on a tour to the
+West Highlands, a tour of which we know little or nothing. Perhaps this
+was merely a pilgrimage to the grave of Highland Mary. We do not know,
+and need not curiously inquire. Burns, as has been already remarked,
+kept sacred his love for this generous-hearted maiden, hidden away in
+his own heart, and the whole story is a beautiful mystery. We do know
+that before he left he visited the Armours, and was disgusted with the
+changed attitude of the family towards himself. 'If anything had been
+wanting,' he wrote to Mr. James Smith, 'to disgust me completely at
+Armour's family, their mean, servile compliance would have done it.' To
+his friend, William Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. 'I never, my
+friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the
+stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my
+plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I
+returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with my
+species.'
+
+This shows Burns in no very enviable frame of mind; but the cause is
+obvious. He is as yet unsettled in life, and now that he has met again
+his Bonnie Jean, and seen his children, he is more than ever
+dissatisfied with aimless roving. 'I have yet fixed on nothing with
+respect to the serious business of life. I am just as usual a rhyming,
+mason-making, raking, aimless, idle fellow. However, I shall somewhere
+have a farm soon. I was going to say a wife too, but that must never be
+my blessed lot.'
+
+To his own folks he was nothing but kindness, ready to share with them
+his uttermost farthing, and to have them share in the glory that was
+his; but he was at enmity with himself, and at war with the world. Like
+Hamlet, who felt keenly, but was incapable of action, he saw that 'the
+times were out of joint'; circumstances were too strong for him. Almost
+the only record we have of this tour is a vicious epigram on what he
+considered the flunkeyism of Inveraray. Nor are we in the least
+astonished to hear that on the homeward route he spent a night in
+dancing and boisterous revel, ushering in the day with a kind of
+burlesque of pagan sun-worship. This was simply a reaction from his
+gloom and despondency; he sought to forget himself in reckless
+conviviality.
+
+About the end of July we find him back again in Mauchline, and on the
+25th May he set out on a Highland tour along with his friend William
+Nicol, one of the masters of the High School. Of this man Dr. Currie
+remarks that he rose by the strength of his talents, and fell by the
+strength of his passions. Burns was perfectly well aware of the
+passionate and quarrelsome nature of the man. He compared himself with
+such a companion to one travelling with a loaded blunderbuss at
+full-cock; and in his epigrammatic way he said of him to Mr. Walker,
+'His mind is like his body; he has a confounded, strong, in-kneed sort
+of a soul.' The man, however, had some good qualities. He had a warm
+heart; never forgot the friends of his early years, and he hated
+vehemently low jealousy and cunning. These were qualities that would
+appeal strongly to Burns, and on account of which much would be
+forgiven. Still we cannot think that the poet was happy in his
+companion; nor was he yet happy in himself. Otherwise the Highland tour
+might have been more interesting, certainly much more profitable to the
+poet in its results, than it actually proved.
+
+In his diary of this tour, as in his diary of the Border tour, there is
+much more of shrewd remark on men and things than of poetical jottings.
+The fact is, poetry is not to be collected in jottings, nor is
+inspiration to be culled in catalogue cuttings; and if many of his
+friends were again disappointed in the immediate poetical results of
+this holiday, it only shows how little they understood the comings and
+goings of inspiration. Those, however, who read his notes and
+reflections carefully and intelligently are bound to notice how much
+more than a mere verse-maker Burns was. This was the journal of a man of
+strong, sound sense and keen observation. It has also to be recognised
+that Burns was at his weakest when he attempted to describe scenery for
+mere scenery's sake. His gift did not lie that way. His landscapes, rich
+in colour and deftly drawn though they be, are always the mere
+backgrounds of his pictures. They are impressionistic sketches, the
+setting and the complement of something of human interest in incident or
+feeling.
+
+The poet and his companion set out in a postchaise, journeying by
+Linlithgow and Falkirk to Stirling. They visited 'a dirty, ugly place
+called Borrowstounness,' where he turned from the town to look across
+the Forth to Dunfermline and the fertile coast of Fife; Carron Iron
+Works, and the field of Bannockburn. They were shown the hole where
+Bruce set his standard, and the sight fired the patriotic ardour of the
+poet till he saw in imagination the two armies again in the thick of
+battle. After visiting the castle at Stirling, he left Nicol for a day,
+and paid a visit to Mrs. Chalmers of Harvieston. 'Go to see Caudron Linn
+and Rumbling Brig and Deil's Mill.' That is all he has to say of the
+scenery; but in a letter to Gavin Hamilton he has much more to tell of
+Grace Chalmers and Charlotte, 'who is not only beautiful but lovely.'
+
+From Stirling the tourists proceeded northwards by Crieff and Glenalmond
+to Taymouth; thence, keeping by the banks of the river, to Aberfeldy,
+whose birks he immortalised in song. Here he had the good fortune to
+meet Niel Gow and to hear him playing. 'A short, stout-built, honest,
+Highland figure,' the poet describes him, 'with his greyish hair shed on
+his honest, social brow--an interesting face, marking strong sense, kind
+open-heartedness mixed with unmistaking simplicity.'
+
+By the Tummel they rode to Blair, going by Fascally and visiting--both
+those sentimental Jacobites--'the gallant Lord Dundee's stone,' in the
+Pass of Killiecrankie. At Blair he met his friend Mr. Walker, who has
+left an account of the poet's visit; while the two days which Burns
+spent here, he has declared, were among the happiest days of his life.
+
+'My curiosity,' Walker wrote, 'was great to see how he would conduct
+himself in company so different from what he had been accustomed to. His
+manner was unembarrassed, plain, and firm. He appeared to have complete
+reliance on his own native good sense for directing his behaviour. He
+seemed at once to perceive and appreciate what was due to the company
+and to himself, and never to forget a proper respect for the separate
+species of dignity belonging to each. He did not arrogate conversation,
+but when led into it he spoke with ease, propriety, and manliness. He
+tried to exert his abilities, because he knew it was ability alone gave
+him a title to be there.'
+
+Burns certainly enjoyed his stay, and would, at the family's earnest
+solicitation, have stayed longer, had the irascible and unreasonable
+Nicol allowed it. Here it was he met Mr. Graham of Fintry, and if he had
+stayed a day or two longer he would have met Dundas, a man whose
+patronage might have done much to help the future fortunes of the poet.
+After leaving Blair, he visited, at the Duke's advice, the Falls of
+Bruar, and a few days afterwards he wrote from Inverness to Mr. Walker
+enclosing his verses, _The Humble Petition of Bruar Water to the Noble
+Duke of Athole_.
+
+Leaving Blair, they continued their journey northwards towards
+Inverness, viewing on the way the Falls of Foyers,--soon to be lost to
+Scotland,--which the poet celebrated in a fragment of verse. Of course
+two such Jacobites had to see Culloden Moor; then they came through
+Nairn and Elgin, crossed the Spey at Fochabers, and Burns dined at
+Gordon Castle, the seat of the lively Duchess of Gordon, whom he had met
+in Edinburgh. Here again he was received with marked respect, and
+treated with the same Highland hospitality that had so charmed him at
+Blair; and here also the pleasure of the whole party was spoilt by the
+ill-natured jealousy of Nicol. That fiery dominie, imagining that he was
+slighted by Burns, who seemed to prefer the fine society of the Duchess
+and her friends to his amiable companionship, ordered the horses to be
+put to the carriage, and determined to set off alone. As the spiteful
+fellow would listen to no reason, Burns had e'en to accompany him,
+though much against his will. He sent his apologies to Her Grace in a
+song in praise of Castle Gordon.
+
+From Fochabers they drove to Banff, and thence to Aberdeen. In this city
+he was introduced to the Rev. John Skinner, a son of the author of
+_Tullochgorum_, and was exceedingly disappointed when he learned that on
+his journey he had been quite near to the father's parsonage, and had
+not called on the old man. Mr. Skinner himself regretted this, when he
+learned the fact from his son, as keenly as Burns did; but the incident
+led to a correspondence between the two poets. From Aberdeen he came
+south by Stonehaven, where he 'met his relations,' and Montrose to
+Dundee. Hence the journey was continued through Perth, Kinross, and
+Queensferry, and so back to Edinburgh, 16th September 1787.
+
+His letter to his brother from Edinburgh is more meagre even than his
+journal, being simply a catalogue of the places visited. 'Warm as I was
+from Ossian's country,' he remarks, 'what cared I for fishing towns or
+fertile carses?' Yet although the journal reads now and again like a
+railway time-table, we come across references which give proof of the
+poet's abounding interest in the locality of Scottish Song; and it was
+probably the case, as Professor Blackie writes, that 'such a lover of
+the pure Scottish Muse could not fail when wandering from glen to glen
+to pick up fragments of traditional song, which, without his sympathetic
+touch, would probably have been lost.'
+
+Burns's wanderings were not yet, however, at an end. Probably he had
+expected on his return to Edinburgh some settlement with Creech, and was
+disappointed. Perhaps he was eager to revisit some places or
+people--Peggy Chalmers, no doubt--without being hampered in his
+movements by such a companion as Nicol. Anyhow, we find him setting out
+again on a tour through Clackmannan and Perthshire with his friend Dr.
+Adair, a warm but somewhat injudicious admirer of the poet's genius. It
+was probably about the beginning of October that the two left
+Edinburgh, going round by Stirling to Harvieston, where they remained
+about ten days, and made excursions to the various parts of the
+surrounding scenery. The Caldron Linn and Rumbling Bridge were
+revisited, and they went to see Castle Campbell, the ancient seat of the
+family of Argyle. 'I am surprised,' the doctor ingenuously remarks,
+'that none of these scenes should have called forth an exertion of
+Burns's muse. But I doubt if he had much taste for the picturesque.' One
+wonders whether Dr. Adair had actually read the published poems. What a
+picture it must have been to see the party dragging Burns about,
+pointing out the best views, and then breathlessly waiting for a torrent
+of verse. The verses came afterwards, but they were addressed, not to
+the Ochils or the Devon, but to Peggy Chalmers.
+
+From Harvieston he went to Ochtertyre on the Teith to visit Mr. Ramsay,
+a reputed lover of Scottish literature; and thence he proceeded to
+Ochtertyre in Strathearn, in order to visit Sir William Murray.
+
+In a letter to Dr. Currie, Mr. Ramsay speaks thus of Burns on this
+visit: 'I have been in the company of many men of genius, some of them
+poets, but never witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness, the
+impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire! I never was more
+delighted, therefore, than with his company for two days'
+_tete-a-tete_.' Of his residence with Sir William Murray he has left two
+poetical souvenirs, one _On Scaring some Water Fowl in Loch Turit_, and
+the other, a love song, _Blithe, Blithe, and Merry was She_, in honour
+of Miss Euphemia Murray, the flower of Strathearn.
+
+Returning to Harvieston, he went back with Dr. Adair to Edinburgh, by
+Kinross and Queensferry. At Dunfermline he visited the ruined abbey,
+where, kneeling, he kissed the stone above Bruce's grave.
+
+It was on this tour, too, that he visited at Clackmannan an old Scottish
+lady, who claimed to be a lineal descendant of the family of Robert the
+Bruce. She conferred knighthood on the poet with the great double-handed
+sword of that monarch, and is said to have delighted him with the toast
+she gave after dinner, 'Hooi Uncos,' which means literally, 'Away
+Strangers,' and politically much more.
+
+The year 1787 was now drawing to a close, and Burns was still waiting
+for a settlement with Creech. He could not understand why he was kept
+hanging on from month to month. This was a way of doing business quite
+new to him, and after being put off again and again he at last began to
+suspect that there was something wrong. He doubted Creech's solvency;
+doubted even his honesty. More than ever was he eager to be settled in
+life, and he fretted under commercial delays he could not understand. On
+the first day of his return to Edinburgh he had written to Mr. Miller of
+Dalswinton, telling him of his ambitions, and making an offer to rent
+one of his farms. We know that he visited Dalswinton once or twice, but
+returned to Edinburgh. His only comfort at this time was the work he had
+begun in collecting Scottish songs for Johnson's Museum; touching up old
+ones and writing new ones to old airs. This with Burns was altogether a
+labour of love. The idea of writing a song with a view to money-making
+was abhorrent to him. 'He entered into the views of Johnson,' writes
+Chambers, 'with an industry and earnestness which despised all money
+considerations, and which money could not have purchased'; while Allan
+Cunningham marvels at the number of songs Burns was able to write at a
+time when a sort of civil war was going on between him and Creech.
+Another reason for staying through the winter in Edinburgh Burns may
+have had in the hope that through the influence of his aristocratic
+friends some office of profit, and not unworthy his genius, might have
+been found for him. Places of profit and honour were at the disposal of
+many who might have helped him had they so wished. But Burns was not now
+the favourite he had been when he first came to Edinburgh. The
+ploughman-poet was no longer a novelty; and, moreover, Burns had the
+pride of his class, and clung to his early friends. It is not possible
+for a man to be the boon-companion of peasants and the associate of
+peers. Had he dissociated himself altogether from his past life, the
+doors of the nobility might have been still held open to him; and no
+doubt the cushioned ease of a sinecure's office would have been had for
+the asking. But in that case he would have lost his manhood, and we
+should have lost a poet. Burns would not have turned his back on his
+fellows for the most lucrative office in the kingdom; that, he would
+have considered as selling his soul to the devil. Yet, on the other
+hand, what could any of these men do for a poet who was 'owre blate to
+seek, owre proud to snool'? Burns waited on in the expectation that
+those who had the power would take it upon themselves to do something
+for him. Perhaps he credited them with a sense and a generosity they
+could not lay claim to; though had one of them taken the initiative in
+this matter, he would have honoured himself in honouring Burns, and
+endeared his name to the hearts of his countrymen for all time. But such
+offices are created and kept open for political sycophants, who can
+importune with years of prostituted service. They are for those who
+advocate the opinions of others; certainly not for the man who dares to
+speak fearlessly his own mind, and to assert the privileges and
+prerogatives of his manhood. The children's bread is not to be thrown to
+the dogs. Burns asked for nothing, and got nothing. The Excise
+commission which he applied for, and graduated for, was granted. The
+work was laborious, the remuneration small, and _gauger_ was a name of
+contempt.
+
+But whilst waiting on in the hope of something 'turning up,' he was
+still working busily for Johnson's Museum, and still trying to bring
+Creech to make a settlement. At last, however, out of all patience with
+his publisher, and recognising the futility of his hopes of preferment,
+he had resolved early in December to leave Edinburgh, when he was
+compelled to stay against his will. A double accident befell him; he was
+introduced to a Mrs. Maclehose, and three days afterwards, through the
+carelessness of a drunken coachman, he was thrown from a carriage, and
+had his knee severely bruised. The latter was an accident that kept him
+confined to his room for a time, and from which he quickly recovered;
+but the meeting with Mrs. Maclehose was a serious matter, and for both,
+most unfortunate in its results.
+
+It was while he was 'on the rack of his present agony' that the
+Sylvander-Clarinda correspondence was begun and continued. That much
+may be said in excuse for Burns. A man, especially one with the passion
+and sensitiveness of a poet, cannot be expected to write in all sanity
+when he is racked by the pain of an injured limb. Certainly the poet
+does not show up in a pleasant light in this absurd interchange of
+gasping epistles; nor does Mrs. Maclehose. 'I like the idea of Arcadian
+names in a commerce of this kind,' he unguardedly admits. The most
+obvious comment that occurs to the mind of the reader is that they ought
+never to have been written. It is a pity they were written; more than a
+pity they were ever published. It seems a terrible thing that, merely to
+gratify the morbid curiosity of the world, the very love-letters of a
+man of genius should be made public. Is there nothing sacred in the
+lives of our great men? 'Did I imagine,' Burns remarked to Mrs. Basil
+Montagu in Dumfries, 'that one half of the letters which I have written
+would be published when I die, I would this moment recall them and burn
+them without redemption.'
+
+After all, what was gained by publishing this correspondence? It adds
+literally nothing to our knowledge of the poet. He could have, and has,
+given more of himself in a verse than he gives in the whole series of
+letters signed Sylvander. Occasionally he is natural in them, but
+rarely. 'I shall certainly be ashamed of scrawling whole sheets of
+incoherence.' We trust he was. The letters are false in sentiment,
+stilted in diction, artificial in morality. We have a picture of the
+poet all through trying to batter himself into a passion he does not
+feel, into love of an accomplished and intellectual woman; while in his
+heart's core is registered the image of Jean Armour, the mother of his
+children. He shows his paces before Clarinda and tears passion to
+tatters in inflated prose; he poses as a stylist, a moralist, a
+religious enthusiast, a poet, a man of the world, and now and again
+accidentally he assumes the face and figure of Robert Burns. We read and
+wonder if this be really the same man who wrote in his journal, 'The
+whining cant of love, except in real passion and by a masterly hand, is
+to me as insufferable as the preaching cant of old father Smeaton, Whig
+minister at Kilmaurs. Darts, flames, cupids, love graces and all that
+farrago are just ... a senseless rabble.'
+
+Clarinda comes out of the correspondence better than Sylvander. Her
+letters are more natural and vastly more clever. She grieves to hear of
+his accident, and sympathises with him in his suffering; were she his
+sister she would call and see him. He is too romantic in his style of
+address, and must remember she is a married woman. Would he wait like
+Jacob seven years for a wife? And perhaps be disappointed! She is not
+unhappy: religion has been her balm for every woe. She had read his
+autobiography as Desdemona listened to the narration of Othello, but she
+was pained because of his hatred of Calvinism; he must study it
+seriously. She could well believe him when he said that no woman could
+love as ardently as himself. The only woman for him would be one
+qualified for the companion, the friend, and the mistress. The last
+might gain Sylvander, but the others alone could keep him. She admires
+him for his continued fondness for Jean, who perhaps does not possess
+his tenderest, faithfulest friendship. How could that bonnie lassie
+refuse him after such proofs of love? But he must not rave; he must
+limit himself to friendship. The evening of their third meeting was one
+of the most exquisite she had ever experienced. Only he must now know
+she has faults. She means well, but is liable to become the victim of
+her sensibility. She too now prefers the religion of the bosom. She
+cannot deny his power over her: would he pay another evening visit on
+Saturday?
+
+When the poet is leaving Edinburgh, Clarinda is heartbroken. 'Oh, let
+the scenes of nature remind you of Clarinda! In winter, remember the
+dark shades of her fate; in summer, the warmth of her friendship; in
+autumn, her glowing wishes to bestow plenty on all; and let spring
+animate you with hopes that your friend may yet surmount the wintry
+blasts of life, and revive to taste a spring-time of happiness. At all
+events, Sylvander, the storms of life will quickly pass, and one
+unbounded spring encircle all. Love, there, is not a crime. I charge you
+to meet me there, O God! I must lay down my pen.'
+
+Poor Clarinda! Well for her peace of mind that the poet was leaving her;
+well for Burns, also, that he was leaving Clarinda and Edinburgh. Only
+one thing remained for both to do, and it had been wise, to burn their
+letters. Would that Clarinda had been as much alive to her own good
+name, and the poet's fair fame, as Peggy Chalmers, who did not preserve
+her letters from Burns!
+
+It was February 1788 before Burns could settle with Creech; and, after
+discharging all expenses, he found a balance in his favour of about five
+hundred pounds. To Gilbert, who was in sore need of the money, he
+advanced one hundred and eighty pounds, as his contribution to the
+support of their mother. With what remained of the money he leased from
+Mr. Miller of Dalswinton the farm of Ellisland, on which he entered at
+Whitsunday 1788.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ELLISLAND
+
+
+When Burns turned his back on Edinburgh in February 1788, and set his
+face resolutely towards his native county and the work that awaited him,
+he left the city a happier and healthier man than he had been all the
+months of his sojourn in it. The times of aimless roving, and of still
+more demoralising hanging on in the hope of something being done for
+him, were at an end; he looked to the future with self-reliance. His
+vain hopes of preferment were already 'thrown behind and far away,' and
+he saw clearly that by the labour of his own hands he had to live,
+independent of the dispensations of patronage, and trusting no longer to
+the accidents of fortune. 'The thoughts of a home,' to quote
+Cunningham's words, 'of a settled purpose in life, gave him a silent
+gladness of heart such as he had never before known.'
+
+Burns, though he had hoped and was disappointed, left the city not so
+much with bitterness as with contempt. If he had been received on this
+second visit with punctilious politeness, more ceremoniously than
+cordially, it was just as he had himself expected. Gossip, too, had been
+busy while he was absent, and his sayings and doings had been bruited
+abroad. His worst fault was that he was a shrewd observer of men, and
+drew, in a memorandum book he kept, pen-portraits of the people he met.
+'Dr Blair is merely an astonishing proof of what industry and
+application can do. Natural parts like his are frequently to be met
+with; his vanity is proverbially known among his acquaintance.' The Lord
+Advocate he pictured in a verse:
+
+    'He clenched his pamphlets in his fist,
+      He quoted and he hinted,
+    Till in a declamation-mist,
+      His argument he tint it.
+    He gap'd for't, he grap'd for't,
+      He fand it was awa, man;
+    But what his common sense came short,
+      He eked it out wi' law, man.'
+
+Had pen-portraits, such as these, been merely caricatures, they might
+have been forgiven; but, unfortunately, they were convincing likenesses,
+therefore libels. We doubt not, as Cunningham tells us, that the
+_literati_ of Edinburgh were not displeased when such a man left them;
+they could never feel at their ease so long as he was in their midst.
+'Nor were the titled part of the community without their share in this
+silent rejoicing; his presence was a reproach to them. The illustrious
+of his native land, from whom he had looked for patronage, had proved
+that they had the carcass of greatness, but wanted the soul; they
+subscribed for his poems, and looked on their generosity "as an alms
+could keep a god alive." He turned his back on Edinburgh, and from that
+time forward scarcely counted that man his friend who spoke of titled
+persons in his presence.'
+
+It was with feelings of relief, also, that Burns left the
+super-scholarly litterateurs; 'white curd of asses' milk,' he called
+them; gentlemen who reminded him of some spinsters in his country who
+'spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.' To
+such men, recognising only the culture of schools, a genius like Burns
+was a puzzle, easier dismissed than solved. Burns saw them, in all their
+tinsel of academic tradition, through and through.
+
+Coming from Edinburgh to the quiet home-life of Mossgiel was like coming
+out of the vitiated atmosphere of a ballroom into the pure and bracing
+air of early morning. Away from the fever of city life, he only
+gradually comes back to sanity and health. The artificialities and
+affectations of polite society are not to be thrown off in a day's time.
+Hardly had he arrived at Mauchline before he penned a letter to
+Clarinda, that simply staggers the reader with the shameless and
+heartless way in which it speaks of Jean Armour. 'I am dissatisfied with
+her--I cannot endure her! I, while my heart smote me for the profanity,
+tried to compare her with my Clarinda. 'Twas setting the expiring
+glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian
+sun. _Here_ was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
+fawning; _there_, polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most
+generous, the most delicate, the most tender passion. I have done with
+her, and she with me.'
+
+Poor Jean! Think of her too confiding and trustful love written down
+_mercenary fawning_! But this was not Burns. The whole letter is false
+and vulgar. Perhaps he thought to please his Clarinda by the comparison;
+she had little womanly feeling if she felt flattered. Let us believe,
+for her own sake, that she was disgusted. His letter to Ainslie, ten
+days later, is something very different, though even yet he gives no
+hint of acknowledging Jean as his wife. 'Jean I found banished like a
+martyr--forlorn, destitute, and friendless--all for the good old cause.
+I have reconciled her to her fate; I have reconciled her to her mother;
+I have taken her a room; I have taken her to my arms; I have given her a
+guinea, and I have embraced her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable
+and full of glory.'
+
+This is flippant in tone, but something more manly in sentiment; Burns
+was coming to his senses. On 13th June, twin girls were born to Jean,
+but they only lived a few days. On the same day their father wrote from
+Ellisland to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, in which we see the real Burns, true
+to the best feelings of his nature, and true to his sorely-tried and
+long-suffering wife. 'This is the second day, my honoured friend, that I
+have been on my farm. A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence, far from
+every object I love, or by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older
+than yesterday, except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on; while
+uncouth cares and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and
+bashful inexperience.... Your surmise, madam, is just; I am, indeed, a
+husband.... You are right that a bachelor state would have ensured me
+more friends; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace
+in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in
+approaching my God, would seldom have been of the number. I found a once
+much-loved and still much-loved female, literally and truly cast out to
+the mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled her to _purchase_ a
+shelter,--there is no sporting with a fellow-creature's happiness or
+misery.'
+
+It was not till August that the marriage was ratified by the Church,
+when Robert Burns and Jean Armour were rebuked for their acknowledged
+irregularity, and admonished 'to adhere faithfully to one another, as
+man and wife, all the days of their life.'
+
+This was the only fit and proper ending of Burns's acquaintance with
+Jean Armour. As an honourable man, he could not have done otherwise than
+he did. To have deserted her now, and married another, even admitting he
+was legally free to do so, which is doubtful, would have been the act of
+an abandoned wretch, and certainly have wrought ruin in the moral and
+spiritual life of the poet. In taking Jean as his wedded wife, he acted
+not only honourably, but wisely; and wisdom and prudence were not always
+distinguishing qualities of Robert Burns.
+
+Some months had to elapse, however, before the wife could join her
+husband at Ellisland. The first thing he had to do when he entered on
+his lease was to rebuild the dwelling-house, he himself lodging in the
+meanwhile in the smoky spence which he mentions in his letter to Mrs.
+Dunlop. In the progress of the building he not only took a lively
+interest, but actually worked with his own hands as a labourer, and
+gloried in his strength: 'he beat all for a dour lift.' But it was some
+time before he could settle down to the necessarily monotonous work of
+farming. 'My late scenes of idleness and dissipation,' he confessed to
+Dunbar, 'have enervated my mind to a considerable degree.' He was
+restless and rebellious at times, and we are not surprised to find the
+sudden settling down from gaiety and travel to the home-life of a farmer
+marked by bursts of impatience, irritation, and discontent. The only
+steadying influence was the thought of his wife and children, and the
+responsibility of a husband and a father. He grew despondent
+occasionally, and would gladly have been at rest, but a wife and
+children bound him to struggle with the stream. His melancholy blinded
+him even to the good qualities of his neighbours. The only things he saw
+in perfection were stupidity and canting. 'Prose they only know in
+graces, prayers, etc., and the value of these they estimate, as they do
+their plaiding webs, by the ell. As for the Muses, they have as much an
+idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet.' He was, in fact, ungracious towards
+his neighbours, not that they were boorish or uninformed folk, but
+simply because, though living at Ellisland in body, his mind was in
+Ayrshire with his darling Jean, and he was looking to the future when he
+should have a home and a wife of his own. His eyes would ever wander to
+the west, and he sang, to cheer him in his loneliness, a song of love to
+his Bonnie Jean:
+
+    'Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,
+      I dearly lo'e the west;
+    For there the bonnie lassie lives,
+      The lassie I lo'e best.'
+
+It was not till the beginning of December that he was in a position to
+bring his wife and children to Ellisland; and this event brought him
+into kindlier relations with his fellow-farmers. His neighbours gathered
+to bid his wife welcome; and drank to the roof-tree of the house of
+Burns. The poet, now that he had made his home amongst them, was
+regarded as one of themselves; while Burns, on his part, having at last
+got his wife and children beside him, was in a healthier frame of mind
+and more charitably disposed towards those who had come to give them a
+welcome. That he was now as one settled in life with something worthy to
+live for, we have ample proof in his letter written to Mrs. Dunlop on
+the first day of the New Year. It is discursive, yet philosophical and
+reflective, and its whole tone is that of a man who looks on the world
+round about him with a kindly charity, and looks to the future with
+faith and trust. Life passed very sweetly and peacefully with the poet
+and his family for a time here. The farm, it would appear, was none of
+the best,--Mr. Cunningham told him he had made a poet's not a farmer's
+choice,--but Burns was hopeful and worked hard. Yet the labour of the
+farm was not to be his life-work. Even while waiting impatiently the
+coming of his wife, he had been contributing to Johnson's Museum, and he
+fondly imagined that he was going to be farmer, poet, and exciseman all
+in one. Some have regretted his appointment to the Excise at this time,
+and attributed to his frequent absences from home his failure as a
+farmer. They may be right. But what was the poet to do? He knew by
+bitter experience how precarious the business of farming was, and
+thought that a certain salary, even though small, would always stand
+between his family and absolute want. 'I know not,' he wrote to Ainslie,
+'how the word exciseman, or, still more opprobrious, gauger, will sound
+in your ears. I too have seen the day when my auditory nerves would have
+felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and children have a
+wonderful power in blunting these kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a
+year for life and a pension for widows and orphans, you will allow, is
+no bad settlement for a _poet_.' And to Blacklock he wrote in verse:
+
+    'But what d'ye think, my trusty fier,
+    I'm turned a gauger--Peace be here!
+    Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear,
+                Ye'll now disdain me!
+    And then my fifty pounds a year
+                Will little gain me.
+
+    I hae a wife and twa wee laddies,
+    They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies;
+    Ye ken yoursel's my heart right proud is--
+                I needna vaunt,
+    But I'll sned besoms--thraw saugh woodies,
+                Before they want.
+
+    But to conclude my silly rhyme
+    (I'm scant o' verse, and scant o' time),
+    To make a happy fireside clime
+                To weans and wife,
+    That's the true pathos and sublime
+                Of human life.'
+
+This was nobly said; and the poet spoke from the heart.
+
+Not content with being gauger, farmer, and poet, Burns took a lively
+interest in everything affecting the welfare of the parish and the
+well-being of its inhabitants. For this was no poet of the study,
+holding himself aloof from the affairs of the world, and fearing the
+contamination of his kind. Burns was alive all-round, and always acted
+his part in the world as a husband and father; as a citizen and a man.
+He made himself the poet of humanity, because he himself was so
+intensely human, and joyed and sorrowed with his fellows. At this time
+he established a library in Dunscore, and himself undertook the whole
+management,--drawing out rules, purchasing books, acting for a time as
+secretary, treasurer, and committee all in one. Among the volumes he
+ordered were several of his old favourites, _The Spectator_, _The Man of
+Feeling_, and _The Lounger_; and we know that there was on the shelves
+even a folio Hebrew Concordance.
+
+A favourite walk of the poet's while he stayed here was along Nithside,
+where he often wandered to take a 'gloamin' shot at the Muses.' Here,
+after a fall of rain, Cunningham records, the poet loved to walk,
+listening to the roar of the river, or watching it bursting impetuously
+from the groves of Friar's Carse. 'Thither he walked in his sterner
+moods, when the world and its ways touched his spirit; and the elder
+peasants of the vale still show the point at which he used to pause and
+look on the red and agitated stream.'
+
+In spite of his multifarious duties, he was now more than ever
+determined to make his name as a poet. To Dr. Moore he wrote (4th
+January 1789): 'The character and employment of a poet were formerly my
+pleasure, but now my pride.... Poesy I am determined to prosecute with
+all my vigour. Nature has given very few, if any, of the profession the
+talents of shining in every species of composition. I shall try (for
+until trial it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me to
+shine in any one.'
+
+It was inevitable that one whose district as an exciseman reached far
+and wide could not regularly attend to ploughing, sowing, and reaping,
+and the farm was very often left to the care of servants. Dr. Currie
+appears to count it as a reproach that his farm no longer occupied the
+principal part of his care or his thoughts. Yet it could not have been
+otherwise. Burns after having undertaken a duty would attend to it
+religiously, and we know that he pursued his work throughout his ten
+parishes diligently, faithfully, and with unvarying punctuality. Others
+have bemoaned that those frequent Excise excursions led the poet into
+temptation, that he was being continually assailed by the sin that so
+easily beset him. Let it be admitted frankly that the temptations to
+social excess were great; is it not all the more creditable to Burns
+that he did not sink under those temptations and become the besotted
+wreck conventional biography has attempted to make him? If those who
+raise this plaint mean to insinuate that Burns became a confirmed toper,
+then they are assuredly wrong; if they be only drawing attention to the
+fact that drinking was too common in Scotland at that time, then they
+are attacking not the poet but the social customs of his day. It would
+be easy if we were to accept 'the general impression of the place,' and
+go by the tale of gossip, to show that Burns was demoralised by his
+duties as a gauger, and sank into a state of maudlin intemperance. But
+ascertained fact and the testimony of unimpeachable authority are at
+variance with the voice of gossip. 'So much the worse for fact,'
+biography would seem to have said, and gaily sped on the work of
+defamation. We only require to forget Allan Cunningham's _Personal
+Sketch of the Poet_, the letters from Mr. Findlater and Mr. Gray, and to
+close our eyes to the excellence of the poetry of this period, in order
+to see Burns on the downgrade, and to preach grand moral lessons from
+the text of a wasted life.
+
+But, after all, 'facts are chiels that winna ding,' and we must take
+them into account, however they may baulk us of grand opportunities of
+plashing in watery sentiment. Speaking of the poet's biographers, Mr.
+Findlater remarks that they have tried to outdo one another in heaping
+obloquy on his name; they have made his convivial habits, habitual
+drunkenness; his wit and humour, impiety; his social talents, neglect of
+duty; and have accused him of every vice. Then he gives his testimony:
+'My connection with Robert Burns commenced immediately after his
+admission into the Excise, and continued to the hour of his death. In
+all that time the superintendence of his behaviour as an officer of the
+revenue was a branch of my especial province; and it may be supposed I
+would not be an inattentive observer of the general conduct of a man and
+a poet so celebrated by his countrymen. In the former capacity, so far
+from its being impossible for him to discharge the duties of his office
+with that regularity which is almost indispensable, as is palpably
+assumed by one of his biographers, and insinuated, not very obscurely
+even, by Dr. Currie, he was exemplary in his attention as an Excise
+officer, and was even jealous of the least imputation on his vigilance.'
+
+But a glance at the poems and songs of this period would be a sufficient
+vindication of the poet's good name. There are considerably over a
+hundred songs and poems written during his stay at Ellisland, many of
+them of his finest. The third volume of Johnson's Museum, published in
+February 1790, contained no fewer than forty songs by Burns. Among the
+Ellisland songs were such as, _Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon_,
+_Auld Lang Syne_, _Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_, _To Mary in Heaven_,
+_Of a' the Airts the Wind can blaw_, _My Love she's but a Lassie yet_,
+_Tam Glen_, _John Anderson my Jo_, songs that have become the property
+of the world. Of the last-named song, Angellier remarks that the
+imagination of the poet must have indeed explored every situation of
+love to have led him to that which he in his own experience could not
+have known. Even the song _Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_, the first of
+bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane mind and healthy
+appetite. It is not of the diseased imagination of drunken genius. But
+the greatest poem of this period, and one of Burns's biggest
+achievements, is _Tam o' Shanter_. This poem was written in answer to a
+request of Captain Grose that the poet would provide a witch story to be
+printed along with a drawing of Alloway Kirk, and was first published in
+Grose's _Antiquities of Scotland_. We have been treated by several
+biographers to a private view of the poet, with wild gesticulations,
+agonising in the composition of this poem; but where his wife did not
+venture to intrude, we surely need not seek to desecrate. 'I stept aside
+with the bairns among the broom,' says Bonnie Jean; not, we should
+imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers. He has been again
+burlesqued for us rending himself in rhyme, and stretched on straw
+groaning elegiacs to Mary in heaven. All this is mere sensationalism
+provided for illiterate readers. We have the poem, and its excellence
+sufficeth.
+
+It is worthy of note that in _Tam o' Shanter_, as well as in _To Mary in
+Heaven_, the poet goes back to his earlier years in Ayrshire. They are
+posthumous products of the inspiration which gave us the Kilmarnock
+Edition. I am not inclined to agree with Carlyle in his estimate of _Tam
+o' Shanter_. It is not the composition of a man of great talent, but of
+a man of transcendent poetical genius. The story itself is a conception
+of genius, and in the narration the genius is unquestionable. It is a
+panorama of pictures so vivid and powerful that the characters and
+scenes are fixed indelibly on the mind, and abide with us a cherished
+literary possession. After reading the poem, the words are recalled
+without conscious effort of memory, but as the only possible embodiment
+of the mental impressions retained. Short as the poem is, there is in it
+character, humour, pathos, satire, indignation, tenderness, fun, frolic,
+diablerie, almost every human feeling. I have heard Burns in the writing
+of this poem likened to a composer at an organ improvising a piece of
+music in which, before he has done, he has used every stop and touched
+every note on the keyboard. Even the weakest lines of the piece, which
+mark a dramatic pause in the rapid narration, have a distinctive beauty
+and are the most frequently quoted lines of the poem. In artistic
+word-painting and graphic phrasing Burns is here at his best. His
+description of the horrible is worthy of Shakspeare; and it is
+questionable if even the imagination of that master ever conceived
+anything more awful than the scene and circumstance of the infernal
+orgies of those witches and warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is!
+In the line, 'The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,' all the
+gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich. Yet the horrible
+details are controlled and unified in the powerful imagination of the
+poet. We believe Dr. Blacklock was right in thinking that this poem,
+though Burns had never written another syllable, would have made him a
+high reputation. Certainly it was not the work of a man daily dazing his
+faculties with drink; no more was that exquisite lyric _To Mary in
+Heaven_. Another poem of this period deserving special mention is _The
+Whistle_, not merely because of its dramatic force and lyrical beauty,
+but because it gives a true picture of the drinking customs of the time.
+And again I dare assert that this is not the work of a mind enfeebled or
+debased by drink. It is a bit of simple, direct, sincere narration,
+humanly healthy in tone; the ideas are clear and consecutive, and the
+language fitting. It is not so that drunken genius expresses itself. The
+language of a poetical mind enfeebled by alcohol or opium is frequently
+mystic and musical; it never deals with the realities and
+responsibilities of life, but in a witchery of words winds and meanders
+through the realms of reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous;
+it is rarely narrative or simple; never direct nor forcible.
+
+In the _Kirk's Alarm_, wherein he again reverted to his Mossgiel period,
+he displayed all his former force of satire, as well as his sympathy
+with those who advocated rational views in religion. Dr. Macgill had
+written a book which the Kirk declared to be heretical, and Burns, at
+the request of some friends, fought for the doctor in his usual way,
+though with little hope of doing him any good. 'Ajax's shield consisted,
+I think, of seven bull-hides and a plate of brass, which altogether set
+Hector's utmost force at defiance. Alas! I am not a Hector, and the
+worthy doctor's foes are as securely armed as Ajax was. Ignorance,
+superstition, bigotry, stupidity, malevolence, self-conceit, envy--all
+strongly bound in a massy frame of brazen impudence; to such a shield
+humour is the peck of a sparrow and satire the pop-gun of a schoolboy.
+Creation-disgracing scelerats such as they, God only can mend, and the
+devil only can punish.' The doctor yielded, Cunningham tells us, and was
+forgiven, but not the poet; pertinently adding, 'so much more venial is
+it in devout men's eyes to be guilty of heresy than of satire.'
+
+Into political as well as theological matters Burns also entered with
+all his wonted enthusiasm. Of his election ballads, the best, perhaps,
+are _The Five Carlins_ and the _Epistle to Mr. Graham of Fintry_. But
+these ballads are not to be taken as a serious addition to the poet's
+works; he did not wish them to be so taken. He was a man as well as a
+poet; was interested with his neighbours in political affairs, and in
+the day of battle fought with the weapons he could wield with effect.
+Nor are his ballads always to be taken as representing his political
+principles; these he expressed in song that did not owe its inspiration
+to the excitement of elections. Burns was not a party man; he had in
+politics, as in religion, some broad general principles, but he had 'the
+warmest veneration for individuals of both parties.' The most important
+verse in his _Epistle to Graham of Fintry_ is the last:
+
+    'For your poor friend, the Bard, afar
+    He hears and only hears the war,
+                A cool spectator purely:
+    So, when the storm the forest rends,
+    The robin in the hedge descends,
+                And sober chirps securely.'
+
+Burns's life was, therefore, quite full at Ellisland, too full indeed;
+for, towards the end of 1791, we find him disposing of the farm, and
+looking to the Excise alone for a livelihood. In the farm he had sunk
+the greater part of the profits of his Edinburgh Edition; and now it was
+painfully evident that the money was lost. He had worked hard enough,
+but he was frequently absent, and a farm thrives only under the eye of a
+master. On Excise business he was accustomed to ride at least two
+hundred miles every week, and so could have little time to give to his
+fields. Besides this, the soil of Ellisland had been utterly exhausted
+before he entered on his lease, and consequently made a miserable return
+for the labour expended on it. The friendly relations that had existed
+between him and his landlord were broken off before now; and towards the
+close of his stay at Ellisland Burns spoke rather bitterly of Mr.
+Miller's selfish kindness. Miller was, in fact, too much of a lord and
+master, exacting submission as well as rent from his tenants; while
+Burns was of too haughty a spirit to beck and bow to any man. 'The life
+of a farmer is,' he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, 'as a farmer paying a dear,
+unconscionable rent, a cursed life.... Devil take the life of reaping
+the fruits that others must eat!'
+
+The poet, too, had been overworking himself, and was again subject to
+his attacks of hypochondria. 'I feel that horrid hypochondria pervading
+every atom of both body and soul. This farm has undone my enjoyment of
+myself. It is a ruinous affair on all hands.' In the midst of his
+troubles and vexations with his farm, he began to look more hopefully to
+the Excise, and to see in the future a life of literary ease, when he
+could devote himself wholly to the Muses. He had already got ranked on
+the list as supervisor, an appointment that he reckoned might be worth
+one hundred or two hundred pounds a year; and this determined him to
+quit the farm entirely, and to try to make a living by one profession.
+As farmer, exciseman, and poet he had tried too much, and even a man of
+his great capacity for work was bound to have succumbed under the
+strain. Even had the farm not proved the ruinous bargain it did, we
+imagine that he must have been compelled sooner or later to relinquish
+one of the two, either his farm or his Excise commission. Circumstances
+decided for him, and in December 1791 he sold by auction his stock and
+implements, and removed to Dumfries, 'leaving nothing at Ellisland but a
+putting-stone, with which he loved to exercise his strength; a memory of
+his musings, which can never die; and three hundred pounds of his money,
+sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all augured
+happiness.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+DUMFRIES
+
+
+When Burns removed from Ellisland to Dumfries, he took up his abode in a
+small house of three apartments in the Wee Vennel. Here he stayed till
+Whitsunday 1793, when the family removed to a detached house of two
+storeys in the Mill Vennel. A mere closet nine feet square was the
+poet's writing-room in this house, and it was in the bedroom adjoining
+that he died.
+
+The few years of his residence in Dumfries have been commonly regarded
+as a period of poverty and intemperance. But his intemperance has always
+been most religiously exaggerated, and we doubt not also that the
+poverty of the family at this time has been made to appear worse than it
+was. Burns had not a salary worthy of his great abilities, it is true,
+but there is good reason to believe that the family lived in comparative
+ease and comfort, and that there were luxuries in their home, which
+neither father nor mother had known in their younger days. Burns liked
+to see his Bonnie Jean neat and trim, and she went as braw as any wife
+of the town. Though we know that he wrote painfully, towards the end of
+his life, for the loan of paltry sums, we are to regard this as a sign
+more of temporary embarrassment than of a continual struggle to make
+ends meet. The word debt grated so harshly on Burns's ears that he
+could not be at peace with himself so long as the pettiest account
+remained unpaid; and if he had no ready money in his hands to meet it,
+he must e'en borrow from a friend. His income, when he settled in
+Dumfries, was 'down money L70 per annum,' and there were perquisites
+which must have raised it to eighty or ninety. Though his hopes of
+preferment were never realised, he tried his best on this slender income
+'to make a happy fireside clime to weans and wife,' and in a sense
+succeeded.
+
+What he must have felt more keenly than anything else in leaving
+Ellisland was, that in giving up farming he was making an open
+confession of failure in his ideal of combining in himself the farmer,
+the poet, and the exciseman. There was a stigma also attaching to the
+name of gauger, that must often have been galling to the spirit of
+Burns. The ordinary labourer utters the word with dry contempt, as if he
+were speaking of a spy. But the thoughts of a wife and bairns had
+already prevailed over prejudice; he realised the responsibilities of a
+husband and father, and pocketed his pride. A great change it must have
+been to come from the quiet and seclusion of Ellisland to settle down in
+the midst of the busy life of an important burgh.
+
+Life in provincial towns in Scotland in those days was simply frittered
+away in the tittle-tattle of cross and causeway, and the insipid talk of
+taverns. The most trifling incidents of everyday life were dissected and
+discussed, and magnified into events of the first importance. Many
+residents had no trade or profession whatever. Annuitants and retired
+merchants built themselves houses, had their portraits painted in oil,
+and thereafter strutted into an aristocracy. Without work, without
+hobby, without healthy recreation, and cursed with inglorious leisure,
+they simply dissipated time until they should pass into eternity. The
+only amusement such lumpish creatures could have was to meet in some inn
+or tavern, and swill themselves into a debauched joy of life. Dumfries,
+when Burns came to it in 1791, was no better and no worse than its
+neighbours; and we can readily imagine how eagerly such a man would be
+welcomed by its pompously dull and leisured topers. Now might their
+meetings be lightened with flashes of genius, and the lazy hours of
+their long nights go fleeting by on the wings of wit and eloquence. Too
+often in Dumfries was Burns wiled into the howffs and haunts of these
+seasoned casks. They could stand heavy drinking; the poet could not. He
+was too highly strung, and if he had consulted his own inclination would
+rather have shunned than sought the company of men who met to quaff
+their quantum of wine and sink into sottish sleep. For Burns was never a
+drunkard, not even in Dumfries; though the contrary has been asserted so
+often that it has all the honour that age and the respectability of
+authority can give it. There was with him no animal craving for drink,
+nor has he been convicted of solitary drinking; but he was intensely
+convivial, and drank, as Professor Blackie put it, 'only as the carnal
+seasoning of a rampant intellectuality.' There is no doubt that he came
+to Dumfries a comparatively pure and sober man; and if he now began to
+frequent the Globe Tavern, often to cast his pearls before swine, let it
+be remembered that he was compelled frequently to meet there strangers
+and tourists who had journeyed for the express purpose of meeting the
+poet. Nowadays writers and professional men have their clubs, and in
+general frequent them more regularly than Burns ever haunted the howffs
+of Dumfries. But we have heard too much about 'the poet's moral course
+after he settled in Dumfries being downward.' 'From the time of his
+migration to Dumfries,' Principal Shairp soberly informs us, 'it would
+appear that he was gradually dropped out of acquaintance by most of the
+Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long been by the parochial and other
+ministers.' Poor lairds! Poor ministers! If they preferred their own
+talk of crops and cattle and meaner things to the undoubted brilliancy
+of Burns's conversation, surely their dulness and want of appreciation
+is not to be laid to the charge of the poet. I doubt not had the poet
+lived to a good old age he would have been gradually dropped out of
+acquaintance by some who have not scrupled to write his biography.
+Politics, it is admitted, may have formed the chief element in the
+lairds' and ministers' aversion, but there is a hint that his irregular
+life had as much to do with it. Is it to be seriously contended that
+these men looked askance at Burns because of his occasional
+convivialities? 'Madam,' he answered a lady who remonstrated with him on
+this very subject, 'they would not thank me for my company if I did not
+drink with them.' These lairds, perhaps even these ministers, could in
+all probability stand their three bottles with the best, and were more
+likely to drop the acquaintance of one who would not drink bottle for
+bottle with them than of one who indulged to excess. It was considered a
+breach of hospitality not to imbibe so long as the host ordained; and
+in many cases glasses were supplied so constructed that they had to be
+drained at every toast. 'Occasional hard drinking,' he confessed to Mrs.
+Dunlop, 'is the devil to me; against this I have again and again set my
+resolution, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally
+abandoned; it is the private parties in the family way among the
+hard-drinking gentlemen of this county that do me the mischief; but even
+this I have more than half given over.' Most assuredly whatever these
+men charged against Robert Burns it was not drunkenness. But he has been
+accused of mixing with low company! That is something nearer the mark,
+and goes far to explain the aversion of those stately Tories. But again,
+what is meant by low company? Are we to believe that the poet made
+associates of depraved and abandoned men? Not for a moment! This low
+company was nothing more than men in the rank of life into which he had
+been born; mechanics, tradesmen, farmers, ploughmen, who did not move in
+the aristocratic circles of patrician lairds or ministers ordained to
+preach the gospel to the poor. It was simply the old, old cry of
+'associating with publicans and sinners.'
+
+We do not defend nor seek to hide the poet's aberrations; he confessed
+them remorselessly, and condemned himself. But we do raise our voice
+against the exaggeration of occasional over-indulgence into confirmed
+debauchery; and dare assert that Burns was as sober a man as the average
+lairds and ministers who had the courage of their prejudices, and wrote
+themselves down asses to all posterity.
+
+But here again the work the poet managed to do is a sufficient disproof
+of his irregular life. He was at this time, besides working hard at his
+Excise business, writing ballads and songs, correcting for Creech the
+two-volume edition of his poems, and managing somehow or other to find
+time for a pretty voluminous correspondence. His hands were full and his
+days completely occupied. He would not have been an Excise officer very
+long had he been unable to attend to his duties. William Wallace, the
+editor of _Chambers's Burns_, has studied very carefully this period of
+the poet's life, and found that in those days of petty faultfinding he
+has not once been reprimanded, either for drunkenness or for dereliction
+of duty. There were spies and informers about who would not have left
+the Excise Commissioners uninformed of the paltriest charge they could
+have trumped up against Burns. Nor is there, when we look at his
+literary work, any falling off in his powers as a poet. He sang as
+sweetly, as purely, as magically as ever he did; and this man, who has
+been branded as a blasphemer and a libertine, had nobly set himself to
+purify the polluted stream of Scottish Song. He was still continuing his
+contributions to Johnson's Museum, and now he had also begun to write
+for Thomson's more ambitious work.
+
+Some of the first of his Dumfriesshire songs owe their inspiration to a
+hurried visit he paid to Mrs. Maclehose in Edinburgh before she sailed
+to join her husband in the West Indies. The best of these are, perhaps,
+_My Nannie's Awa'_ and _Ae Fond Kiss_. The fourth verse of the latter
+was a favourite of Byron's, while Scott claims for it that it is worth a
+thousand romances--
+
+    'Had we never loved so kindly,
+    Had we never loved so blindly!
+    Never met--or never parted,
+    We had ne'er been broken-hearted.'
+
+Another song of a different kind, _The Deil's awa wi' the Exciseman_,
+had its origin in a raid upon a smuggling brig that had got into shallow
+water in the Solway. The ship was armed and well manned; and while
+Lewars, a brother-excisemen, posted to Dumfries for a guard of dragoons,
+Burns, with a few men under him, watched to prevent landing or escape.
+It was while impatiently waiting Lewars's return that he composed this
+song. When the dragoons arrived Burns put himself at their head, and
+wading, sword in hand, was the first to board the smuggler. The affair
+might ultimately have led to his promotion had he not, next day at the
+sale of the vessel's arms and stores in Dumfries, purchased four
+carronades, which he sent, with a letter testifying his admiration and
+respect, to the French Legislative Assembly. The carronades never
+reached their destination, having been intercepted at Dover by the
+Custom House authorities. It is a pity perhaps that Burns should have
+testified his political leanings in so characteristic a way. It was the
+impetuous act of a poet roused to enthusiasm, as were thousands of his
+fellow-countrymen at the time, by what was thought to be the beginning
+of universal brotherhood in France. But whatever may be said as to the
+impulsive imprudence of the step, it is not to be condemned as a most
+absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum. We were not at war with
+France at this time; had not even begun to await developments with
+critical suspicion. Talleyrand had not yet been slighted by our Queen,
+and protestations of peace and friendship were passing between the two
+Governments. Any subject of the king might at this time have written a
+friendly letter or forwarded a token of goodwill to the French
+Government, without being suspected of disloyalty. But by the time the
+carronades had reached Dover the complexion of things had changed; and
+yet even in those critical times Burns's action, though it may have
+hindered promotion, does not appear to have been interpreted as 'a most
+absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum.' That interpretation was left
+for biographers made wise with the passions of war; and yet they have
+not said in so many words, what they darkly insinuate, that the poet was
+not a loyal British subject. His love of country is too surely
+established. That, later, he thought the Ministry engaging in an unjust
+and unrighteous war, may be frankly admitted. He was not alone in his
+opinion; nor was he the only poet carried away with a wild enthusiasm of
+Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Societies were then springing up all
+over the country calling for redress of grievances and for greater
+political freedom. Such societies were regarded by the Government of the
+day as seditious, and their agitations as dangerous to the peace of the
+country; and Burns, though he did not become a member of the Society of
+the Friends of the People, was at one with them in their desire for
+reform. It was known also that he 'gat the _Gazeteer_,' and that was
+enough to mark him out as a disaffected person. No doubt he also talked
+imprudently; for it was not the nature of this man to keep his
+sentiments hidden in his heart, and to talk the language of expediency.
+What he thought in private he advocated publicly in season and out of
+season; and it was quite in the natural course of things that
+information regarding his political opinions should be lodged against
+him with the Board of Excise. His political conduct was made the subject
+of official inquiry, and it would appear that for a time he was in
+danger of dismissal from the service. This is a somewhat painful episode
+in his life; and we find him in a letter to Mr. Graham of Fintry
+repudiating the slanderous charges, yet confessing that the tender ties
+of wife and children 'unnerve courage and wither resolution.' Mr.
+Findlater, his superior, was of opinion that only a very mild reprimand
+was administered, and the poet warned to be more prudent in his speech.
+But what appeared mild to Mr. Findlater was galling to Burns. In his
+letter to Erskine of Mar he says: 'One of our supervisors-general, a Mr.
+Corbet, was instructed to inquire on the spot and to document me--that
+my business was to act, _not to think_; and that whatever might be men
+or measures it was for me to be _silent_ and _obedient_.'
+
+We can hardly conceive a harsher sentence on one of Burns's temperament,
+and we doubt not that the degradation of being thus gagged, and the
+blasting of his hopes of promotion, were the cause of much of the
+bitterness that we find bursting from him now more frequently than ever,
+both in speech and writing. That remorse for misconduct irritated him
+against himself and against the world, is true; but it is none the less
+true that he must have chafed against the servility of an office that
+forbade him the freedom of personal opinion. In the same letter he
+unburdens his heart in a burst of eloquent and noble indignation.
+
+'Burns was a poor man from birth, and an exciseman by necessity; but--I
+_will_ say it--the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase;
+his independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not
+subdue.... I have three sons who, I see already, have brought into the
+world souls ill-qualified to inhabit the bodies of slaves.... Does any
+man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does
+not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation?
+I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to
+rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence.'
+
+What the precise charges against him were, we are not informed. It is
+alleged that he once, when the health of Pitt was being drunk,
+interposed with the toast of 'A greater than Pitt--George Washington.'
+There can be little fault found with the sentiment. It is given to poets
+to project themselves into futurity, and declare the verdict of
+posterity. But the occasion was ill-chosen, and he spoke with all a
+poet's imprudence. In another company he aroused the martial fury of an
+unreasoning captain by proposing the toast, 'May our success in the
+present war be equal to the justice of our cause.' A very humanitarian
+toast, one would think, but regarded as seditious by the fire-eating
+captain, who had not the sense to see that there was more of sedition in
+his resentment than in Burns's proposal. Yet the affair looked black
+enough for a time, and the poet was afraid that even this story would be
+carried to the ears of the commissioners, and his political opinions be
+again misrepresented.
+
+Another thing that came to disturb his peace of mind was his quarrel
+with Mrs. Riddell of Woodley Park, where he had been made a welcome
+guest ever since his advent to this district. That Burns, in the heat of
+a fever of intoxication, had been guilty of a glaring act of impropriety
+in the presence of the ladies seated in the drawing-room, we may gather
+from the internal evidence of his letter written the following morning
+'from the regions of hell, amid the horrors of the damned.' It would
+appear that the gentlemen left in the dining-room had got ingloriously
+drunk, and there and then proposed an indecorous raid on the
+drawing-room. Whatever it might be they did, it was Burns who was made
+to suffer the shame of the drunken plot. His letter of abject apology
+remained unanswered, and the estrangement was only embittered by some
+lampoons which he wrote afterwards on this accomplished lady. The affair
+was bruited abroad, and the heinousness of the poet's offence vastly
+exaggerated. Certain it is that he became deeply incensed against not
+only the lady, but her husband as well, to whom he considered he owed no
+apology whatever. Matters were only made worse by his unworthy verses,
+and it was not till he was almost on the brink of the grave that he and
+Mrs. Riddell met again, and the old friendship was re-established. The
+lady not only forgot and forgave, but she was one of the first after the
+poet's death to write generously and appreciatively of his character and
+abilities.
+
+That the quarrel with Mrs. Riddell was prattled about in Dumfries, and
+led other families to drop the acquaintance of the poet, we are made
+painfully aware; and in his correspondence now there is rancour,
+bitterness, and remorse more pronounced and more settled than at any
+other period of his life. He could not go abroad without being reminded
+of the changed attitude of the world; he could not stay at home without
+seeing his noble wife uncomplainingly nursing a child that was not hers.
+He cursed himself for his sins and follies; he cursed the world for its
+fickleness and want of sympathy. 'His wit,' says Heron, 'became more
+gloomy and sarcastic, and his conversation and writings began to assume
+a misanthropical tone, by which they had not been before in any eminent
+degree distinguished. But with all his failings his was still that
+exalted mind which had raised itself above the depression of its
+original condition, with all the energy of the lion pawing to free his
+hinder limbs from the yet encumbering earth.'
+
+His health now began to give his friends serious concern. To Cunningham
+he wrote, February 24, 1794: 'For these two months I have not been able
+to lift a pen. My constitution and my frame were _ab origine_ blasted
+with a deep, incurable taint of hypochondria, which poisons my
+existence.' A little later he confesses: 'I have been in poor health. I
+am afraid that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My
+medical friends threaten me with a flying gout, but I trust they are
+mistaken.' His only comfort in those days was his correspondence with
+Thomson and with Johnson. He kept pouring out song after song,
+criticising, rewriting, changing what was foul and impure into songs of
+the tenderest delicacy. He showed love in every mood, from the rapture
+of pure passion in the _Lea Rig_, the maidenly abandon of _Whistle and
+I'll come to you, my Lad_, to the humour of _Last May a Braw Wooer_ and
+_Duncan Gray_, and the guileless devotion of _O wert thou in the Cauld
+Blast_. But he sang of more than love. Turning from the coldness of the
+high and mighty, who had once been his friends, he found consolation in
+the naked dignity of manhood, and penned the hymn of humanity, _A Man's
+a Man for a' that_. Perhaps he found his text in _Tristram Shandy_:
+'Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value
+to a bit of base metal, but gold and silver pass all the world over with
+no other recommendation than their own weight.' Something like this
+occurs in Massinger's _Duke of Florence_, where it is said of princes
+that
+
+    'They can give wealth and titles, but no virtues;
+    This is without their power.'
+
+Gower also had written--
+
+    'A king can kill, a king can save;
+    A king can make a lord a knave,
+    And of a knave a lord also.'
+
+But the poem is undoubtedly Burns's, and it is one he must have written
+ere he passed away. _Scots wha hae_ is another of his Dumfries poems.
+Mr. Syme gives a highly-coloured and one-sided view of the poet riding
+in a storm between Gatehouse and Kenmure, where we are assured he
+composed this ode. Carlyle accepts Syme's authority, and adds:
+'Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through
+the soul of Burns; but to the external ear it should be sung with the
+throat of the whirlwind.' Burns gives an account of the writing of the
+poem, which it is difficult to reconcile with Mr. Syme's sensational
+details. It matters not, however, when or how it was written; we have it
+now, one of the most martial and rousing odes ever penned. Not only has
+it gripped the heart of Scotsmen, but it has taken the ear of the world;
+its fire and vigour have inspired soldiers in the day of battle, and
+consoled them in the hour of death. We are not forgetful of the fact
+that Mrs. Hemans, who wrote some creditable verse, and the placid
+Wordsworth, discussed this ode, and agreed that it was little else than
+the rhodomontade of a schoolboy. It is a pity that such authorities
+should have missed the charm of _Scots wha hae_. More than likely they
+made up for the loss in a solitary appreciation of _Betty Foy_ or _The
+Pilgrim Fathers_.
+
+Another martial ode, composed in 1795, was called forth by the immediate
+dangers of the time. The country was roused by the fear of foreign
+invasion, and Burns, who had enrolled himself in the ranks of the
+Dumfriesshire Volunteers, penned the patriotic song, _Does Haughty Gaul
+Invasion threat?_ This song itself might have reinstalled him in public
+favour, and dispelled all doubt as to his loyalty, had he cared again to
+court the society of those who had dropped him from the list of their
+acquaintance. But Burns had grown indifferent to any favour save the
+favour of his Muse; besides, he was now shattered in health, and
+assailed with gloomy forebodings of an early death. For himself he would
+have faced death manfully, but again it was the thought of wife and
+bairns that unmanned him.
+
+Not content with supplying Thomson with songs, he wrote letters full of
+hints and suggestions anent songs and song-making, and now and then he
+gave a glimpse of himself at work. We see him sitting under the shade of
+an old thorn crooning to himself until he gets a verse to suit the
+measure he has in his mind; looking round for objects in nature that are
+in unison and harmony with the cogitations of his fancy; humming every
+now and then the air with the verses; retiring to his study to commit
+his effusions to paper, and while he swings at intervals on the hind
+legs of his elbow-chair, criticising what he has written. A common walk
+of his when he was in the poetical vein was to the ruins of Lincluden
+Abbey, whither he was often accompanied by his eldest boy; sometimes
+towards Martingdon ford, on the north side of the Nith. When he returned
+home with a set of verses, he listened attentively to his wife singing
+them, and if she happened to find a word that was harsh in sound, a
+smoother one was immediately substituted; but he would on no account
+ever sacrifice sense to sound.
+
+During the earlier part of this year Burns had taken his full share in
+the political contest that was going on, and fought for Heron of Heron,
+the Whig candidate, with electioneering ballads, not to be claimed as
+great poems nor meant to be so ranked, but marked with all his
+incisiveness of wit and satire, and with his extraordinary deftness of
+portraiture. Heron was the successful candidate, and his poetical
+supporter again began to indulge in dreams of promotion: 'a life of
+literary leisure with a decent competency was the summit of his wishes.'
+But his dreams were not to be realised.
+
+In September his favourite child and only daughter, Elizabeth, died at
+Mauchline, and he was prostrated with grief. He had also taken very much
+to heart the inexplicable silence of his old friend, and for many years
+constant correspondent, Mrs. Dunlop. To both these griefs he alludes in
+a letter to her, dated January 31, 1796: 'These many months you have
+been two packets in my debt. What sin of ignorance I have committed
+against so highly valued a friend I am utterly at a loss to guess. Alas!
+madam, I can ill afford at this time to be deprived of any of the small
+remnant of my pleasures. I have lately drunk deep of the cup of
+affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child,
+and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power
+to pay my last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that
+shock when I became myself the victim of a severe rheumatic fever, and
+long the die spun doubtful, until, after many weeks of a sickbed, it
+seems to have turned up life.'
+
+There was an evident decline in the poet's appearance, Dr. Currie tells
+us, for upwards of a year before his death, and he himself was sensible
+that his constitution was sinking. During almost the whole of the winter
+of 1795-96 he had been confined to the house. Then follows the
+unsubstantiated story which has done duty for Shakspeare and many other
+poets. 'He dined at a tavern, returned home about three o'clock in a
+very cold morning, benumbed and intoxicated. This was followed by an
+attack of rheumatism.' It is difficult to kill a charitable myth,
+especially one that is so agreeable to the levelling instincts of
+ordinary humanity, and of such sweet consolation to the weaker brethren.
+Of course there are variants of the story, with a stair and sleep and
+snow brought in as sensational, if improbable, accessories; but such
+stories as these all good men refuse to believe, unless they are
+compelled to do so by the conclusive evidence of direct authority; and
+that, in this case, is altogether awanting. All evidence that has been
+forthcoming has gone directly against it, and the story may be accepted
+as a myth. The fact is that brains have been ransacked to find reason
+for the poet's early death,--as if the goings and comings of death could
+be scientifically calculated in biography,--and the last years of his
+'irregular life' are blamed: Dumfries is set apart as the chief sinner.
+No doubt his life was irregular there; his duties were irregular; his
+hours were irregular. But Burns in his thirty-six years, had lived a
+full life, putting as much into one year as the ordinary sons of men put
+into two. He had had threatenings of rheumatism and heart disease when
+he was an overworked lad at Lochlea; and now his constitution was
+breaking up from the rate at which he had lived. Excess of work more
+than excess of drink brought him to an early grave. During his few
+years' stay at Dumfries he had written over two hundred poems, songs,
+etc., many of them of the highest excellence, and most of them now
+household possessions. Besides his official duties, we know also that he
+took a great interest in his home and in the education of his children.
+Mr. Gray, master of the High School of Dumfries, who knew the poet
+intimately, wrote a long and interesting letter to Gilbert Burns, in
+which he mentions particularly the attention he paid to his children's
+education. 'He was a kind and attentive father, and took great delight
+in spending his evenings in the cultivation of the minds of his
+children. Their education was the grand object of his life; and he did
+not, like most parents, think it sufficient to send them to public
+schools; he was their private instructor; and even at that early age
+bestowed great pains in training their minds to habits of thought and
+reflection, and in keeping them pure from every form of vice. This he
+considered a sacred duty, and never to his last illness relaxed in his
+diligence.'
+
+Throughout the winter of 1795 and spring of 1796, he could only keep up
+an irregular correspondence with Thomson. 'Alas!' he wrote in April, 'I
+fear it will be long ere I tune my lyre again. I have only known
+existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of sickness, and counted
+time by the repercussion of pain. I close my eyes in misery and open
+them without hope.' Yet it was literally on his deathbed that he
+composed the exquisite song, _O wert thou in the Cauld Blast_, in honour
+of Jessie Lewars, who waited on him so faithfully. In June he wrote: 'I
+begin to fear the worst. As to my individual self I am tranquil, and
+would despise myself if I were not; but Burns's poor widow and half a
+dozen of his dear little ones--helpless orphans!--there, I am weaker
+than a woman's tear.'
+
+From Brow, whither he had gone to try the effect of sea-bathing, he
+wrote several letters all in the same strain, one to Cunningham; a
+pathetic one to Mrs. Dunlop, regretting her continued silence; and
+letters begging a temporary loan to James Burness, Montrose, and to
+George Thomson, whom he had been supplying with songs without fee or
+reward. Thomson at once forwarded the amount asked--five pounds! To his
+wife, who had not been able to accompany him, he wrote: 'My dearest
+love, I delayed writing until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing
+was likely to produce. It would be injustice to deny it has eased my
+pain.... I will see you on Sunday.'
+
+During his stay at Brow he met again Mrs. Riddell, and she has left in a
+letter her impression of his appearance at that time. 'The stamp of
+death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching the
+brink of eternity.... He spoke of his death with firmness as well as
+feeling as an event likely to happen very soon.... 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.... The conversation was kept up with great evenness and
+animation on his side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more
+collected.'
+
+When he returned from Brow he was worse than when he went away, and
+those who saw him tottering to his door knew that they had looked their
+last on the poet. The question in Dumfries for a day or two was, 'How is
+Burns now?' And the question was not long in being answered. He knew he
+was dying, but neither his humour nor his wit left him. 'John,' he said
+to one of his brother volunteers, 'don't let the awkward squad fire over
+me.'
+
+He lingered on for a day or two, his wife hourly expecting to be
+confined and unable to attend to him, and Jessie Lewars taking her
+place, a constant and devoted nurse. On the fourth day after his return,
+July 21, he sank into delirium, and his children were summoned to the
+bedside of their dying father, who quietly and gradually sank to rest.
+His last words showed that his mind was still disturbed by the thought
+of the small debt that had caused him so much annoyance. 'And thus he
+passed,' says Carlyle, 'not softly, yet speedily, into that still
+country where the hailstorms and fire-showers do not reach, and the
+heaviest laden wayfarer at length lays down his load.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE
+
+
+In Mrs. Riddell's sketch of Burns, which appeared shortly after his
+death, she starts with the somewhat startling statement that poetry was
+not actually his _forte_. She did not question the excellence of his
+songs, or seek to depreciate his powers as a poet, but she spoke of the
+man as she had known him, and was one of the first to assert that Burns
+was very much more than an uneducated peasant with a happy knack of
+versification. Even in the present day we hear too much of the inspired
+ploughman bursting into song as one that could not help himself, and
+warbling of life and love in a kind of lyrical frenzy. The fact is that
+Burns was a great intellectual power, and would have been a force in any
+sphere of life or letters. All who met him and heard him talk have
+insisted on the greatness of the man, apart from his achievements in
+poetry. It was not his fame as a poet that made him the lion of a season
+in Edinburgh, but the force and brilliancy of his conversation; and it
+needs more than the reputation of a minstrel to explain the hold he has
+on the affection and intelligence of the world to-day.
+
+On the other hand, it would be a mistake to accept his intellectual
+greatness as a mere tradition of those who knew him, and to regret that
+he has not left us some long and ponderous work worthy of the power he
+possessed. It is an absurd idea to imagine that every great poet ought
+to write an epic or a play. Burns's powers were concentrative, and he
+could put into a song what a dramatist might elaborate into a five-act
+tragedy; but that is not to say that the dramatist is the greater poet.
+After all, the song is the more likely to live, and the more likely,
+therefore, to keep the mission of the poet an enduring and living
+influence in the lives of men.
+
+Still Burns might have been a great song-writer without becoming the
+name and power he is in the world to-day. The lyrical gift implies a
+quick emotional sense, which in some cases may be little more than a
+beautiful defect in a weak nature. But Burns was essentially a strong
+man. His very vices are the vices of a robust and healthy humanity.
+Besides being possessed of all the qualities of a great singer, he was
+at the same time vigorously human and throbbing with the love and joy of
+life. It is this sterling quality of manhood that has made Burns the
+poet and the power he is. He looked out on the world with the eyes of a
+man, and saw things in their true colours and in their natural
+relations. He regarded the world into which he had been born, and saw it
+not as some other poet or an artist or a painter might have beheld
+it,--for the purposes of art,--but in all its uncompromising realism;
+and what his eye saw clearly, his lips as clearly uttered. His first and
+greatest gift, therefore, as a poet was his manifest sincerity. His men
+and women are living human beings; his flowers are real flowers; his
+dogs, real dogs, and nothing more. All his pictures are presented in
+the simplest and fewest possible words. There is no suspicion of
+trickery; no attempt to force words to carry a weight of meaning they
+are incapable of expressing. He knew nothing of the deification of
+style, and on absolute truthfulness and unidealised reality rested his
+poetical structure. Wordsworth speaks of him--
+
+    'Whose light I hailed when first it shone,
+          And showed my youth
+    How verse may build a princely throne
+          On humble truth.'
+
+It is this quality that made Burns the interpreter of the lives of his
+fellow-men, not only to an outside world that knew them not, but to
+themselves. And he has glorified those lives in the interpretation, not
+by the introduction of false elements or the elimination of unlovely
+features, but simply by his insistence, in spite of the sordidness of
+poverty, on the naked dignity of man.
+
+Everything he touched became interesting because it was interesting to
+him, and he spoke forth what he felt. For Burns did not go outside of
+his own life, either in time or place, for subject. There are poetry and
+romance, tragedy and comedy ever waiting for the man who has eyes to see
+them; and Burns's stage was the parish of Tarbolton, and he found his
+poetry in (or rendered poetical) the ordinary humdrum life round about
+him. For that reason it is, perhaps, that he has been called the
+satirist and singer of a parish. Had he lived nowadays, he would have
+been relegated to the kailyard, there to cultivate his hardy annuals
+and indigenous daisies. For Burns did not affect exotics, and it
+requires a specialist in manure to produce blue dandelions or sexless
+ferns. In the narrow sense of the word he was not parochial. Whilst true
+to class and country, he reached out a hand to universal man. A Scotsman
+of Scotsmen, he endeared himself to the hearts of a people; but he was
+from first to last a man, and so has found entrance to the hearts of all
+men. Although local in subject, he was artistic in treatment; he might
+address the men and women of Mauchline, but he spoke with the voice of
+humanity, and his message was for mankind.
+
+Besides interpreting the lives of the Scottish peasantry, he revived for
+them their nationality. For he was but the last of the great bards that
+sang the Iliad of Scotland; and in him, when patriotism was all but
+dead, and a hybrid culture was making men ashamed of their land and
+their language, the voices of nameless ballad-makers and forgotten
+singers blended again into one great voice that sang of the love of
+country, till men remembered their fathers, and gloried in the name of
+Scotsmen. His patriotism, however, was not parochial. It was no mere
+prejudice which bound him hand and foot to Scottish theme and Scottish
+song. He knew that there were lands beyond the Cheviots, and that men of
+other countries and other tongues joyed and sorrowed, toiled and sweated
+and struggled and hoped even as he did. He was attached to the people of
+his own rank in life, the farmers and ploughmen amongst whom he had been
+born and bred; but his sympathies went out to all men, prince or
+peasant, beggar or king, if they were worthy of the name of men he
+recognised them as brothers. It is this sympathy which gives him his
+intimate knowledge of mankind. He sees into the souls of his fellows;
+the thoughts of their hearts are visible to his piercing eye. He who had
+mixed only with hard-working men, and scarcely ever been beyond the
+boundary of his parish, wrote of court and parliament as if he had known
+princes and politicians from his boyhood. The goodwife of Wauchope House
+would hardly credit that he had come straight from the plough-stilts--
+
+    'And then sae slee ye crack your jokes
+    O' Willie Pitt and Charlie Fox;
+    Our great men a' sae weel descrive,
+    And how to gar the nation thrive,
+    Ane maist would swear ye dwalt amang them,
+    And as ye saw them sae ye sang them.'
+
+But his intuitive knowledge of men is apparent in almost all he wrote.
+Every character he has drawn stands out a living and breathing
+personality. This is greatly due to the fact that he studied those he
+met, as _men_, dismissing the circumstance of birth and rank, of costly
+apparel, or beggarly rags. For rank and station after all are mere
+accidents, and count for nothing in an estimate of character. Indeed,
+Burns was too often inclined from his hard experience of life to go
+further than this, and to count them disqualifying circumstances. This
+aggressive independence was, however, always as far removed from
+insolence as it was from servility. He saw clearly that the 'pith o'
+sense and pride o' worth' are beyond all the dignities a king can
+bestow; and he looked to the time when class distinctions would cease,
+and the glory of manhood be the highest earthly dignity.
+
+    'Then let us pray that come it may--
+      As come it will for a' that--
+    That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
+      May bear the gree and a' that!
+        For a' that, and a' that,
+          It's comin' yet, for a' that,
+        That man to man, the warld o'er,
+          Shall brothers be for a' that!'
+
+Besides this abiding love of his fellow-man, or because of it, Burns had
+also a childlike love of nature and all created things. He sings of the
+mountain daisy turned up by his plough; his heart goes out to the mouse
+rendered homeless after all its provident care. Listening at home while
+the storm made the doors and windows rattle, he bethought him on the
+cattle and sheep and birds outside--
+
+    'I thought me on the ourie cattle
+    Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
+                  O' wintry war,
+    And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle
+                  Beneath a scaur.'
+
+Nor is there in his love of nature any transcendental strain; no mawkish
+sentimentality, and consequently in its expression no bathos. Everywhere
+in his poetry nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail,
+at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is telling and
+effective, yet always in harmony with the feeling of the poem, and
+always subordinate to it. His descriptions of scenery are never dragged
+in. They are incidental and complementary; human life and human feeling
+are the first consideration; to this his scenery is but the setting and
+background. He is never carried away by the force or beauty of his
+drawing as a smaller artist might have been. The picture is given with
+simple conciseness, and he leaves it; nor does he ever attempt to
+elaborate a detail into a separate poem. The description of the burn in
+_Hallowe'en_ is most beautiful in itself, yet it is but a detail in a
+great picture--
+
+    'Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,
+      As thro' the glen it wimpl't;
+    Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays;
+      Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't;
+    Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays,
+      Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle;
+    Whyles cookit underneath the braes,
+      Below the spreading hazel,
+                  Unseen that night.'
+
+That surely is the perfection of description; whilst the wimple of the
+burn is echoed in the music of the verse!
+
+Allied to the clearness of vision and truthfulness of presentment of
+Burns, growing out of them it may be, is that graphic power in which he
+stands unexcelled. He is a great artist, and word-painting is not the
+least of his many gifts. He combines terseness and lucidity, which is a
+rare combination in letters; his phrasing is as beautiful and fine as it
+is forcible, which is a distinction rarer still. Hundreds of examples of
+his pregnant phrasing might be cited, but it is best to see them in the
+poems. Many have become everyday expressions, and have passed into the
+proverbs of the country.
+
+Another of Burns's gifts was the saving grace of humour. This, of
+course, is not altogether a quality distinct in itself, but rather a
+particular mode in which love or tenderness or pity may manifest
+itself. This humour is ever glinting forth from his writings. Some of
+his poems--_The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare_, for example--are
+simply bathed in it, and we see the subject glowing in its light, soft
+and tremulous, as of an autumn sunset. In others, again, it flashes and
+sparkles, more sportive than tender. But, however it manifest itself, we
+recognise at once that it has a character of its own, which marks it off
+from the humour of any other writer; it is a peculiar possession of
+Burns.
+
+Perhaps the poem in which all Burns's poetic qualities are seen at their
+best is _The Jolly Beggars_. The subject may be low and the materials
+coarse, but that only makes the finished poem a more glorious
+achievement. For the poem is a unity. We see those vagabonds for a
+moment's space holding high revel in Poosie Nansie's; but in that brief
+glance we see them from their birth to their death. They are flung into
+the world, and go zigzagging through it, chaffering and cheating,
+swaggering and swearing; kicked and cuffed from parish to parish; their
+only joy of existence an occasional night like this, a carnival of drink
+and all sensuality; snapping their fingers in the face of the world, and
+as they have lived so going down defiantly to death, a laugh on their
+lips and a curse in their heart. Every character in it is individual and
+distinct from his neighbour; the language from first to last simple,
+sensuous, musical. Of this poem Matthew Arnold says: 'It has a breadth,
+truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach's cellar of
+Goethe's _Faust_ seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only
+matched by Shakspeare and Aristophanes.'
+
+_The Cotter's Saturday Night_ has usually, in Scotland, been the most
+lauded of his poems. Many writers give it as his best. It is a pious
+opinion, but is not sound criticism. Burns handicapped himself, not only
+by the stanza he selected for this poem, but also by the attitude he
+took towards his subject. He is never quite himself in it. We admire its
+many beauties; we see the life of the poor made noble and dignified; we
+see, in the end, the soul emerging from the tyranny of time and
+circumstance; but with all that we feel that there is something
+awanting. The priest-like father is drawn from life, and the picture is
+beautiful; not less deftly drawn is the mother's portrait, though it be
+not so frequently quoted:
+
+    'The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy
+    What makes the youth so bashfu' and so grave;
+    Weel pleased to think her bairn's respected like the lave.'
+
+The last line gives one of the most natural and most subtle touches in
+the whole poem. The closing verses are, I think, unhappy. The poet has
+not known when to stop, keeps writing after he has finished, and so
+becomes stilted and artificial.
+
+It is in his songs, however, more than in his poems, that we find Burns
+most regularly at his best. And excellence in song-writing is a rare
+gift. The snatches scattered here and there throughout the plays of
+Shakspeare are perhaps the only collection of lyrics that can at all
+stand comparison with the wealth of minstrelsy Burns has left behind
+him. This was his undying legacy to the world. Song-writing was a labour
+of love, almost his only comfort and consolation in the dark days of his
+later years. He set himself to this as to a congenial task, and he knew
+that he was writing himself into the hearts of unborn generations. His
+songs live; they are immortal, because every one is a bit of his soul.
+These are no feverish, hysterical jingles of clinking verse, dead save
+for the animating breath of music. They sing themselves, because the
+spirit of song is in them. Quite as marvellous as his excellence in this
+department of poetry is his variety of subject. He has a song for every
+age; a musical interpretation of every mood. But this is a subject for a
+book to itself. His songs are sung all over the world. The love he sings
+appeals to all, for it is elemental, and is the love of all. Heart
+speaks to heart in the songs of Robert Burns; there is a freemasonry in
+them that binds Scotsmen to Scotsmen across the seas in the firmest
+bonds of brotherhood.
+
+What place Burns occupies as a poet has been determined not so much by
+the voice of criticism, as by the enthusiastic way in which his
+fellow-mortals have taken him to their heart. The summing-up of a judge
+counts for little when the jury has already made up its mind. What
+matters it whether a critic argues Burns into a first or second or third
+rate poet? His countrymen, and more than his countrymen, his brothers
+all the world over, who read in his writings the joys and sorrows, the
+temptations and trials, the sins and shortcomings of a great-hearted
+man, have accepted him as a prophet, and set him in the front rank of
+immortals. They admire many poets; they love Robert Burns. They have
+been told their love is unreasoning and unreasonable. It may be so. Love
+goes by instinct more than by reason; and who shall say it is wrong? Yet
+Burns is not loved because of his faults and failings, but in spite of
+them. His sins are not hidden. He himself confessed them again and
+again, and repented in sackcloth and ashes. If he did not always abjure
+his weaknesses, he denounced them, and with no uncertain voice; nor do
+we know how hardly he strove to do more.
+
+What estimate is to be taken of Burns as a man will have many and
+various answers. Those who still denounce him as the chief of sinners,
+and without mercy condemn him out of his own mouth, are those whom Burns
+has pilloried to all posterity. There are dull, phlegmatic beings with
+blood no warmer than ditch-water, who are virtuous and sober citizens
+because they have never felt the force of temptation. What power could
+tempt them? The tree may be parched and blistered in the heat of
+noonday, but the parasitical fungus draining its sap remains cool--and
+poisonous. So in the glow of sociability the Pharisee remains cold and
+clammy; the fever of love leaves his blood at zero. How can such
+anomalies understand a man of Burns's wild and passionate nature, or,
+indeed, human nature at all? The broad fact remains, however much we may
+deplore his sins and shortcomings, they are the sins and shortcomings of
+a large-hearted, healthy, human being. Had he loved less his fellow men
+and women, he might have been accounted a better man. After all, too, it
+must be remembered that his failings have been consistently exaggerated.
+Coleridge, in his habit of drawing nice distinctions, admits that Burns
+was not a man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius. Burns
+was neither the one nor the other. In spite of the occasional excesses
+of his later years, he did not degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the
+sense of his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less
+clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had ever been.
+Had he lived a few years longer, we should have seen the man mellowed by
+sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as he had done all along with
+the passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with the fortitude
+and dignity of one who had learned that contentment and peace are gifts
+the world cannot give, and, if he haply find them in his own heart,
+which it cannot take away. That is the lesson we read in the closing
+months of Burns's chequered career.
+
+But it was not to be. His work was done. The message God had sent him
+into the world to deliver he had delivered, imperfectly and with
+faltering lips it may be, but a divine message all the same. And because
+it is divine men still hear it gladly and believe.
+
+Let all his failings and defects be acknowledged, his sins as a man and
+his limitations as a poet, the want of continuity and purpose in his
+work and life; but at the same time let his nobler qualities be weighed
+against these, and the scale 'where the pure gold is, easily turns the
+balance.' In the words of Angellier: 'Admiration grows in proportion as
+we examine his qualities. When we think of his sincerity, of his
+rectitude, of his kindness towards man and beast; of his scorn of all
+that is base, his hatred of all knavery which in itself would be an
+honour; of his disinterestedness, of the fine impulses of his heart, and
+the high aspirations of his spirit; of the intensity and idealism
+necessary to maintain his soul above its circumstances; when we reflect
+that he has expressed all these generous sentiments to the extent of
+their constituting his intellectual life; that they have fallen from him
+as jewels ... as if his soul had been a furnace for the purification of
+precious metals, we are tempted to regard him as belonging to the elect
+spirits of humanity, to those gifted with exceptional goodness. When we
+recall what he suffered, what he surmounted, and what he has effected;
+against what privations his genius struggled into birth and lived; the
+perseverance of his apprenticeship; his intellectual exploits; and,
+after all, his glory, we are inclined to maintain that what he failed to
+accomplish or undertake is as nothing in comparison with his
+achievements.... There is nothing left but to confess that the clay of
+which he was made was thick with diamonds, and that his life was one of
+the most valiant and the most noble a poet ever has lived.'
+
+With Burns's own words we may fitly conclude. They are words not merely
+to be read and admired, but to be remembered in our hearts and practised
+in our lives--
+
+    'Then gently scan your brother Man,
+      Still gentler sister Woman;
+    Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
+      To step aside is human:
+    One point must still be greatly dark,
+      The moving _Why_ they do it;
+    And just as lamely can ye mark,
+      How far perhaps they rue it.
+
+    Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
+      Decidedly can try us,
+    He knows each chord--its various tone,
+      Each spring--its various bias:
+    Then at the balance let's be mute,
+      We never can adjust it;
+    What's _done_ we partly may compute,
+      But know not what's _resisted_'
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Burns, by Gabriel Setoun
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