- ; ' ' ' ' ' -; v " ' 1' " t " ' v ' ' > ( ' : ' -' ' " '.' ' $. ^> , , LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class THE OXFORD BIOGRAPHIES ROBERT BURNS THE OXFORD BIOGRAPHIES BANTE SAVONAROLA JOHN HOWARD . ALFRED TENNYSON WALTER RALEIGH ERASMUS THE YOUNG PRETENDER ROBERT BURNS . LORD CHATHAM . FRANCIS OF ASSISI CANNING BEACONSFIELD GOETHE By PAGET TOYNBEE By E. L. S. HORSBURGH By E. C. S. GIBSON By A. C. BENSON By I. A. TAYLOR By E. F. H. CAPEY By C. S. TERRY By T. F. HENDERSON By A. S. MCDOWALL By A. M. STODDART By W. ALISON PHILLIPS By WALTER SICHEL By H. G. ATKINS. ROBERT BURNS From the crayon drawing by Archibald Skir-ving ' By permission of Messrs. T. C. and E. C Jack ROBERT BURNS T. F. HENDERSON WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON New and Cheaper Issue First Published . . . January 1904. New and Cheaper Issue 1905 CONTENTS CHAPTER I BOYHOOD 1759-1774 PAGE Genealogy Parentage Connection with Jacobitism Alloway Influence of his Father Murdoch's School Mount Oliphant Love of Books Early Companions Farm Drudgery Solitude The Seeds of Poesy Dalrymple Ayr -" The First of Human Joys" " Handsome Nell" . . I CHAPTER II EARLY MANHOOD 1774-1780 Kirkoswald Study of Mankind Taverns Peggy Thomson Love and Trigonometry Dancing Schools Offends his Father Dissipation Sociality Love Adventures Lack of Aim Stirrings of Ambition Lochlea Tarbolton Bachelors' Club Foppery Disputes with the Orthodox Miscellaneous Reading Early Poetry 19 224153 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER III IRVINE AND ITS RESULTS 1781-1783 PAGE Desire to Marry Elison Begbie Jilted Irvine Partnership Hypochondria Destruction of Shop Town Life Richard Brown A Fashion- able Failing Return to Lochlea Death of his Father First Common-Place Book The Poet on Himself Freemasonry Elizabeth Paton Penitential and Defiant Verses " The Cutty Stool " " The Poet's Welcome " Influence of Fergusson . . . . . 31 CHAPTER IV MOSSGIEL 1783-1786 Failure as a Farmer Consciousness of Genius Poetic Hopes Mauchline Young Men Poetic Satires Burns and the Kirk His Religious Belief Jean Armour Chambers-Stevenson Fictions The Unlucky " Paper " The Kirk and Marriages Mutilation of the Paper Rage and Despair of Burns Mary Campbell A Bachelor's Certificate Emigration Resolves In Hiding Poetic Publications The Kilmarnock Volume Charac- teristics of his Verse . . 52 CHAPTER V EDINBURGH AND SCOTTISH TOURS 1787-1788 Reluctance to Emigrate Feelings of a Father A Secret Wretchedness "The Gloomy Night" CONTENTS vii PAGE Death of Mary Campbell Proposed Second Edition of Poems Sets out for Edinburgh Reception on the Way Arrival Impressions Patrons The Crochallan Club "The Brothers of the Mystic Tie" Personal Influence Sub- scriptions for the New Volume Arrangement with Creech Publication Southern Tour At Mauchline Tour in the West Highlands Northern Tour Love Adventures Mrs. Macle- hose . . . . . .93 CHAPTER VI ELLISLAND 1788-1791 Future Plans Ellisland taken Promised Commission as Exciseman Shelters Jean Armour Recognises her as his Wife His Reasons for this Last Appearance before the Kirk - session Life at Ellisland Friendship with Mrs. Dunlop Captain Riddell Burns and Farming Poetic Aims Johnson's Scots Musical Museum As Lyrist His English Verse "Tarn o' Shanter," etc. Untoward Circumstances Becomes Exciseman Farm a Failure Poetic Studies Prepares to leave Ellisland Farm Sales . . 133 CHAPTER VII DUMFRIES 1 792-1 796 Burns and the Excise Declines Offer of Captain Miller Drawbacks of Excise and of Dumfries Life viii CONTENTS PAGE Social Habits Excise Gag Political and Social Views Discontent Postponement of Poetic Aims Thomson's Scottish Airs Character of Contributions to Thomson's Work Poetry of his Later Years Causes of Indifferent Health Convivial Habits Burns and Mrs. Riddell Dumfries Gossip Last Illness Death Legacy . 161 BIBLIOGRAPHY THE POET'S OWN EDITIONS . . . .191 PRINCIPAL POSTHUMOUS EDITIONS . . .192 BIOGRAPHIES, ESSAYS, CRITICISMS, ETC., OF SPECIAL INTEREST . , . . . .193 197 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Burns, from the crayon drawing by Archibald Skirving . ..... Frontispiece Mother of Burns to face p. 2 High Street, Mauchline . . to face p. 52 Poosie Nansie's ...... to face p. 58 Mossgiel, after D. O. Hill . . .to face p. 90 Burns, from the Nasmyth painting in the National Gallery, Edinburgh . . to face p. in Burns, from the engraving of the original, Nasmyth ...... to face p. 128 Ellisland, after D. O. Hill . . to face p. 135 Mrs. Burns and Granddaughter . . to face p. 140 Dumfries from the Observatory . . to face p. 161 Burns in his later Years . . . .to face p. 177 House in which Burns died . . .to face p. 190 ROBERT BURNS CHAPTER I BOYHOOD 1759-1774 Genealogy Parentage Connection with Jacobitism Allo- way Influence of his Father Murdoch's School Mount Oliphant Love of Books Early Companions Farm Drudgery Solitude The Seeds of Poesy Dalrymple Ayr * * The First of Human Joys " "Handsome Nell." THE genealogy of Robert Burns, so far as it can now be ascertained, has been pretty fully set forth by Dr. Charles Rogers in his Book of Burns, 1891. The poet's paternal descent was from a line of tenant-farmers in Kincardineshire, which can be traced back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. A varying tradition that the first Kincardineshire ancestor was a fugitive Argyllshire Walter Campbell, who adopted the name Burnhouse afterwards changed to Burness from the place of his birth or his new resid- ence, is hardly reconcilable with ascertained facts. I 2 ROBERT BURNS Nor is even the theory of Rogers at all probable, that the Kincardineshire family derived their name from Burnhouse of Kair in Kincardineshire. There is, in fact, no reason for supposing that the Kincardineshire name, of which the earliest known form is Burnes, is of different origin from the English Burns, which in the form of Burnes is found in records as early as the tenth century. Further, the Scottish name was not confined to Kincardineshire. We have it, for example, in Midlothian, as Burnis, as early as the sixteenth century ; and what is more interesting, early in the sixteenth century, and doubtless long anterior to this, the name in this form was known in Ayrshire. The Ayrshire name may derive from the old lands of Burnys in Cunningham ; but in any case mention is made in the Great Seal Register of Scotland of one John Burnis, an Ayrshire notary public, as early as 1538 ; so that a more plausible, as well as much more romantic (if still improbable), hypo- thesis than the Campbell one would be that the Kincardineshire family had its ancestral home in Coila, of which their great descendant was to become the immortal bard. As for the poet's mother, Agnes Broun, her ancestral home undoubtedly was Ayrshire, where the name, of Norse origin, occurs before the days of the Bruce. But the Norse Brouns had been much inter- THIS MOTHER OF KO1JEKT BURNS From painting in possession of Rev. ll'illiam Dickens BOYHOOD 3 married with the Welsh or semi- Welsh families of Strathclyde: indeed, Agnes Broun's grand- mother rejoiced in the unmistakable Strathclyde Welsh name M'Grean, and her mother was a Rennie. If, therefore, Celtic genius be claimed for Burns, he probably owed it to his maternal rather than paternal descent; and while in his mother's delight in the old songs and ballads there are symptoms of a poetic temperament, by no means manifest in the able but douce and sober-minded father, it was from her that the poet inherited his re- markable eyes. Nevertheless in his case, as in that of most lowland Scots, the question of race is hopelessly complicated; and he, moreover, possessed a personality so rich and rare as to con- found all traceable laws of heredity. Of more tangible bearing on certain characteristics of his poetry is the fact that, whatever the proportion of the different racial molecules in his blood, he was on both sides of ancient peasant farmer descent, and that though dowered with a genius which in a sense raised him above mere class distinctions, he retained to the last the tastes and idiosyncrasies of the Scottish peasant. The poet in his Jacobite moods his Jacobitism, he admitted, was mostly " matter of sport " was accustomed to make much of the Jacobite loyalty of his ancestors. To Lady Winifred Maxwell 4 ROBERT BURNS Constable he wrote that he and she were " common sufferers in a cause where even to be unfortunate is glorious, the cause of heroic loyalty " ; and he confided to her that his forefathers, like her own, had " shaken hands with ruin for what they esteemed the cause of their king and country." In his Autobiography he also more specifically asserted that his " forefathers rented land of the famous noble Keiths of Marshal" [Keiths, Earls Marischal], "and had the honour to share their fate/' they " dared to welcome ruin and shake hands with infamy." All this his brother Gilbert clearly regarded as little better than a fairy tale ; he advised Currie to omit this portion of the ancestral annals, and it is certain that here, as was occasionally his habit in regard to personal details, Robert was at least indulging in superlatives. His grandfather as Ramsay of Ochtertyre reported Burns to affirm may have been "out" with the Earl Marischal in the '15, and on the Earl's forfeiture may have lost his situation as gardener at Inverugie ; but, if not before, not long after this he was able to rent the farm of Kinmonth, whence in 1721 he re- moved to the farm of Clochnahill. Later he also rented another farm, but about 1747 money difficulties compelled him to vacate both farms. There is, however, no evidence that his troubles were due even to the '45 ; indeed, the only possible BOYHOOD 5 rebel of the name in the official lists is one David Bumoss (possibly Burness) in the Montrose district, residence and occupation unknown ; but it may be that the poet regarded his grandfather's loss of his situation after the '15, coupled with the compulsory absence of the Earl Marischal, as the real source of the subsequent calamities, and this, in a sense, may have been true, though at the most the grandfather represented only a very mild type of the Jacobite victim. According to Burns, it was the worldly diffi- culties of the grandfather that " threw " his third son William, the poet's father, " on the world at large." In 1740 the poet's father had become apprentice to a gardener, but he may have re- turned to assist the grandfather in the manage- ment of his farms, and it may have been the loss of the farms that caused him in 1748, when twenty-seven years of age, to leave Kincardine- shire for "his many years' wanderings and so- journeyings." After two years of jobbing work in Edinburgh, frequently obtained with difficulty, he secured a situation in Ayrshire, and he finally became gardener and overseer to the Provost of Ayr, Ferguson of Doonholm, in the parish of Alloway. While in the service of the Ayr provost he became engaged to Agnes Broun, and after leasing seven acres of land at Alloway which he designed to cultivate as a nursery and market 6 ROBERT BURNS garden and erecting on it with his own hands a two-roomed clay cottage, he set up house with her on 15th December 1757. Here, as humor- ously chronicled in " Rantin' Rovin' Robin," their eldest child, the poet, first saw the light on 25th January 1759. In the course of his experiences in Edinburgh and elsewhere William Burnes had opportunities for acquiring a varied knowledge of the world, and so shrewdly had he utilised them that, in the opinion of the son, few whom he met " understood men, their manners and their ways, equal to him." His practical wisdom was, however, rendered partly ineffective by defects resulting, like those of the son, from the exceptional strength of his personality. In the father's case they assumed the form of " stubborn ungainly integrity and headlong ungovernable irascibility " ; and those " disqualifying circumstances," as the son describes them, proved ultimately too many for him. But whatever the attitude of William Burnes to the world and his taskmasters, to his children it was almost wholly admirable. Their welfare was his first care, and if he viewed their interests with somewhat too serious eyes, his primary appeal was to their intelligence and affection. Less the parental disciplinarian than the interested companion, he was ever ready to respond to the curiosity of their bright intelligences, and BOYHOOD 7 especially eager to foster their love of knowledge. Everything was subordinated to their good, and thus when, had the father remained gardener, Robert "must have marched off to have been one of the little underlings about a farmhouse/' he, with " the assistance of his generous master, ventured on a small farm in the gentleman's estate " his aim being " to have it in his power to keep his children under his own eye till they could discern between good and evil/' In this he may have been influenced by the uncommon characteristics of his eldest son, which even at this early age could hardly have escaped the notice of such a shrewd observer of human nature. It was also apparently for his eldest son's instruc- tion that he compiled, shortly after removing to Mount Oliphant, the " Short Manual of Religious Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son," and indeed, as it is in the form of answers to a son, it may have been suggested by the curiosity of Robert, who states that one of the things for which he was then " a good deal noted " was " an enthusiastic idiot piety/' Though in no respect speculative or philosophical, it indicates an acutely logical intelligence within a certain limited round of reflection, and if oppressively sombre in tone, it avoids the harsher aspects of the Kirk theology, one notable feature being that it discants at length upon religion " giving pleasure to animal life," 8 ROBERT BURNS instead of ignoring, or pretending to dislike or despise, the joys of the present world. It may have been that the remarkable boy was specially inquisitive on this point. Robert seems to have been taught by his father until his sixth year, when he was sent to a small school at Alloway Mill ; but lacking confidence in the teacher's abilities, the father joined with a few of his more enlightened neighbours in securing the services of a clever young teacher from Ayr, John Murdoch, for whom they hired a room in the village of Alloway. After the removal of the family to Mount Oliphant in 1766, Robert though doubtless already doing duty as " a little under- ling" on the farm continued with his brother Gilbert to attend Murdoch's school for other two years. One notable feature of Murdoch's teach- ing was partly aided, as Murdoch himself states, by the suggestions of William Burnes his ex- cellent method of instruction in English. Robert thus acquired a far more thorough knowledge of English than was then possible at any of the parish schools. Of himself he writes, that at the cost of some thrashings he "made an excellent English scholar " ; and Gilbert states that the sc circumstance " was "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 BOYHOOD 9 books that came in his way with much pleasure and improvement." His love of literature, and especially poetry, was first awakened by the perusal of the more excellent portions of his school-reader, Masson's Collection of English Prose and Verse, the earliest thing he recollected taking pleasure in being "The Vision of Mirza," and a hymn of Addison's, beginning "How are Thy servants blest, O Lord!" of which one half-stanza in particular was music to his boyish ears " For though on dreadful whirls we hung High on the broken wave." One of the dominant peculiarities of his character and poetry enthusiasm for the heroic was early fostered by the perusal of the Life of Hannibal, the first book he read in private, and later of the Life of William Wallace, the modern- ised and condensed version of Blind Harry's poem by Hamilton of Gilbertfield. They afforded him, he affirms, "more pleasure than any two books" he ever read afterwards. "Hannibal," he says, " gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough that I might be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the flood- gates of life shut in eternal rest." io ROBERT BURNS Another trait which developed early was his marvellous interest in his fellows. " My social disposition," he says, ee when not checked by some modification of spirited pride, like our catechism's definition of Infinitude, was e without bounds or limits/ " In his early boyhood he seems to have sought its gratification less among fellow-scholars of his own rank than among the more intelligent boys of the neighbouring Ayr. " I formed," he says, " many connections with other younkers who possessed superior advantages the youngling actors who were busy with the rehearsal of parts in which they were shortly to appear on that stage where, alas ! I was destined to drudge behind the scenes." On those ingen- uous youths it is evident that the peasant boy exercised already something of that personal sorcery of which all sorts and conditions of men and women were yet to acknowledge the matchless charm. " My young superiors," he says, " never insulted the clouterly appearance of my plough-boy carcase, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons. They would give me stray volumes of books ; among them, even then, I could pick up some observations ; and one, whose heart I am sure not even the ( Munny Begum's ' scenes have tainted, helped me to a little French." Plainly the proper place for this BOYHOOD ii marvellous boy was in the forefront of the world's stage, and not, as he sadly phrased it, " behind the scenes " ; and it must have been with tenfold more reluctance he returned to his drudgery after those glimpses of the shining prospects of his young companions. For it was mere drudgery drudgery severe and unmitigated to which he had to return. The father's venture had not proved a happy one. The soil of Mount Oliphant was of that quality which no labour and skill could render very fruitful, and accidental losses brought almost hope- less embarrassments, especially after the family fell into the hands of a pitiless factor, whose sole endeavour was to secure from them the last farthing of rent. The difficulty could be met only by cutting down expenses to the lowest possible figure, and by taxing to the utmost the endurance and strength of each member of the family able to work. Neither man- nor maid- servant were they able to afford, and therefore Robert, as the oldest, had almost from his thirteenth year to do the work of a man and more. He himself describes his life at this time as combining "the gloom of a hermit with the toil of a galley slave." By virtue of marvellous stamina and vitality he survived the ordeal, and even emerged from it in apparent possession of exceptional bodily strength ; but there is good 12 ROBERT BURNS reason to suppose that its effects on both his physical and mental constitution were permanently hurtful. "I doubt not/' writes Gilbert, " 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." Even more injurious and depressing than the ceaseless bodily toil must, to one of his boundless sociality and eager outlook on life, have been the terrible monotony, and especially the lack of boyish companions. " We rarely/' says Gilbert, " saw anybody but the members of our own family. There were no boys of our own age or near it in the neighbourhood." The main compensating ad- vantage was a particularly close intimacy with, for his rank in life, an exceptionally intelligent father. "He conversed," says Gilbert, "famili- arly with us on all topics as if we had been men " ; and Robert affirms that it was to his father's observation and experience he was indebted for most of his pretensions to wisdom by which wisdom he meant probably the BOYHOOD 13 theoretical rather than the practical variety. Happily the boys were also able, at meal-times and other odd moments, to indulge a little in the noble recreation of reading, their father doing his utmost to supply them with instructive perhaps too merely instructive books. Hard monotonous toil, an almost total lack of boyish companionships and amusements, intellectual intercourse with a remarkable but very serious-minded father, the one recreation of access to a few instructive books it was Spartan, and even too Spartan discipline ! Its influence could not be quite wholesome either physically, mentally, or morally ; and if, in the case of one so variously and richly gifted as Burns, it must have helped mightily to develop reflection, it no doubt also tended to arouse bitter feelings of rebellion, not of course against his sorely burdened and heroic father, but against some of the social arrangements of this best of possible worlds. Yet the peculiar character of his boyhood had probably a good deal to do with the apotheosis of Burns as a bard. While in different and happier circumstances he might have found scope for his abounding energy in other fields of ambition, the only break in the dead wall of his monotony was, in his boyhood, through the gate of literature. By it alone could his imagination communicate with the wonderful world outside the narrow 14 ROBERT BURNS limits of his experience. Thus literature became to him in a peculiar sense an anchor of hope ; and, overflowing with ideas and emotions which could find no sufficient scope within the limited sphere of his practical possibilities, it was almost inevitable that, sooner or later, he should seek to emulate especially those forms of literature which had afforded him so much consolation and de- light. How far his poetic sensibilities were due to the early strain of his nervous system it is of course impossible to say, though this, as well as the rustic solitude of his early life, must have assisted to quicken them. He also acknowledges special poetic indebtedness to an old maid of his mother's, ce remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition." "She had," he says, ee 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 look- out 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." Is it, then, assuming too much BOYHOOD 15 to suppose that this credulous old maid has even left some definite impress on portions of his verse ? That she is, for example, partly responsible for the mental condition which conjured up the vision of the last enemy in "Death and Doctor Hornbook"? Or that to her influence is to be traced some of the more weird effects of " Tarn o' Shanter " ? Or, not to mention various apposite references to the spectral world in other verse, that but for her he might never have penned " The Address to the De'il," as he certainly would not have penned it with such a wealth of droll and graphic allusion ? A slight break in the toilsome round of mon- otony occurred to him in the summer of 1772, when, for one quarter, he was sent, week about with his brother Gilbert, to the parish school of Dalrymple to improve his writing ; and in the following year he had a more enjoyable holiday time, one week before harvest and two weeks after it being spent with his old teacher Mur- doch at Ayr in revising his English grammar and commencing the study of French. Return- ing armed with a French dictionary and grammar and the Adventures of Telemachus, he made rapid progress in ability, at least, to intrepret the language, being very soon able to read any French author in prose. With Latin, the study of which he attempted without help, he was less 16 ROBERT BURNS successful. He had no interest in mere linguistic peculiarities, his aim being to get access to the literature. In the case of Latin the linguistic peculiarities were more difficult to master; and finding the study "dry and uninteresting/' he recurred to it only intermittently, making it, according to Gilbert, a sort of mental refuge when " suffering from any little chagrin or disappoint- ment, particularly in his love affairs " ; but (e the Latin seldom predominated more than a day or two at a time, or a week at most/' His love affairs for years the malady appeared, if not in mild, at least in short and far from fatal forms began early, his introduction to "the first of human joys" occurring in his fifteenth year, when he had as his partner in the harvest "a bewitching creature who just counted an autumn less/' The "girl," he says, " sung a song, which was said to be composed by a small country laird's son, on one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love ; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he ; for, excepting smearing sheep and casting peats (his father living in the moors), he had no more scholarship than I had." The result was his earliest song, " Handsome Nell," bearing patent marks of juvenility and lack of rhyming experience, but containing also a few ingenuous felicities, which betray at least the poet in embryo. Of the song he, some ten years after- BOYHOOD 17 wards, inserted an interesting criticism in his First Common- Place Book, giving the perference to the fifth stanza : " She dresses ay sae clean and neat, Baith decent and genteel ; And then there's something in her gait Gars onie dress look weel," which is at least delightfully naive and sincere. Of the last stanza he observes that it "has several minute faults " ; but he adds, " I com- posed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts and my blood sallies at the remembrance." Here it is, the usual epitome of the lover's philosophy : " 'Tis this in Nelly pleases me, 'Tis this enchants my soul ! For absolutely in my breast She reigns without control." " Thus," says the rustic bard, in his Autobio- graphy, fe with me began love and poesy, which at times have been my only, and, till within this last twelve months" [he wrote in August 1787], "have been my highest enjoyment." How long Nellie continued to reign within his breast we have no information. His passion such as it was most likely died gradually out after it had " got vent in i8 ROBERT BURNS rhyme." Indeed, he says that he never expressly told her that he loved her ; and though he was of opinion that she also had " caught the contagion/' he was perhaps unable to summon up courage even to recite to her his verses. CHAPTER II EARLY MANHOOD -1774-1780 Kirkoswald Study of Mankind Taverns Peggy Thomson Love and Trigonometry Dancing Schools Offends his Father Dissipation Sociality Love Adventures Lack of Aim Stirrings of Ambition Lochlea Tarbolton Bachelors' Club Foppery Disputes with the Orthodox Miscellaneous Reading Early Poetry. WE resume the story of the poet's life after the passage of some twelve months or more so uneventful that he has nothing to record of them, except to mention that he was " perhaps the most ungainly, awkward being in the parish/' and that ee no solitaire was less acquainted with the ways of the world." In 1775 he had, how- ever, the exceptional experience of a summer "spent a good distance from home, at the smuggling village of Kirkoswald, to learn mensuration and surveying." Here he lodged with his mother's brother, Samuel Broun, who, if 19 20 ROBERT BURNS we may judge from the tone of the letter of the nephew to him several years afterwards, could hardly have been so sternly Puritan in his notions as the poet's father ; and at any rate he seems to have left the young man very much to his own devices. Though he made " pretty good progress in his studies/' he there also made "a, greater progress in the knowledge of mankind" the mankind not being always the more reputable portion of the community. "The contraband trade/' he states, " was at this time very success- ful ; scenes of swaggering riot and roving dissipation were as yet new to me, and I was no enemy to social life." Thus, so he affirms, he "here learnt to look unconcernedly on a large tavern-bill, and to mix without fear in a drunken squabble " ; and one naturally asks, when or by whom was the tavern-bill finally paid, for the youthful reveller must have been but sparingly supplied with pocket money? Probably the proper reply is that the " unconcern " he then learnt about tavern-bills was mainly theoretical, and not put into practice till a good many years afterwards ; l and on the whole we may infer that he was rather an interested and amused spectator 1 As late as January 1783 he wrote to Murdoch that, " especially in tavern matters," he was ft a strict economist, not indeed for the sake of the money," but because he scorned " to fear the face of any man living," etc. EARLY MANHOOD 21 of those scenes of dissipation than a full parti- cipant in them. From other sources we learn that he also took part in various athletic contests, displaying, although a mere novice, great skill as well as agility and strength ; and the visit was moreover eventful from the fact that he then obtained particulars of the story which he was to utilise for "Tarn o' Shanter." Withal, however, he "went on with a high hand" in his studies "till" he jocularly says, "the sun entered Virgo" [23rd August], "a month which is always a carnival in my bosom. A charming filette, who lived next door to the school, overset my trigonometry, and set me off in a tangent from the sphere of my studies." Happily for his studies, and perhaps for his further peace of mind, when the intrusion happened, but one week more of his stay at Kirkoswald remained ; and although during it he " did nothing but craze the faculties " of his " soul about her and steal out to meet with her," he seems, judging from his interest in a mere literary correspondence with his school- fellows, to have regained much of his tranquillity soon after his return home, the passion perhaps being " soothed into quiet " after its " ebullition " in " song second " [" Now Westlin' Winds "] in the Kilmarnock edition, or rather, we must suppose, a very imperfect form of this song. In the First Common-Place Book the song appears 22 ROBERT BURNS merely as a fragment of eight lines, corresponding pretty nearly with the first eight lines of the published version. This final version is much too finished a production for the lad of seventeen, and is, besides, too reminiscent and tranquil in tone, as well as too full of irrelevant references, to have been the mere ebullition of a passion. The name of the girl was Peggy Thomson. According to Mrs. Begg, the poet's sister, the passion was renewed in 1784, but of this he himself says nothing, and the Peggy alluded to in a letter of November 1784 may have been not Peggy Thomson, but Montgomerie's Peggie, whom he, probably about this time, discovered to be the "rightful property of another." But the acquaintanceship in some form or other was no doubt renewed, for after she had been for some time the wife of a Kirkoswald friend, Burns, when about, as he supposed, to set out to the West Indies, presented her with a copy of his Kilmarnock volume with the inscription beginning " Once fondly loved, and still remembered dear." And he relates that when on this last occasion he took farewell of her, " neither she nor I could speak a syllable." One result of the Kirkoswald experiences was that shortly after his return home he, in EARLY MANHOOD 23 defiance of the paternal wishes, resolved, "in order/' as he says, " to give his manners a brush/' though his purpose was no doubt more com- prehensive, to go to a country dancing school. His young manhood was beginning decisively to assert itself. His momentary glimpse of freedom only made him realise more keenly the dreariness of the old round of toil ; and the recoil from "the gloom of the hermit" had already partly commenced. Nor here was it the son but rather the father that was at fault, for the case was one in which some kind of diversion was urgent ; and, moreover, it was vain to suppose that this remarkable young man would be content to model himself merely after the pattern of his father. The father's convictions were, however, as inexorable as the son's ; he dared not carry out his veto, but he could not excuse or forget. " From that instant of rebellion," writes the son, " my father took a kind of dislike to me, which I believe was one of the causes of that dissipa- tion which marked my future years." He adds that by "dissipation" he means "dissipation comparative with the strictness and sobriety of Presbyterian country life " ; but since he nevertheless practically admits that he carried this "dissipation," harmless or innocent though for some years it was, to excess, we may well believe that had the father been more tolerant 24 ROBERT BURNS and sympathetic, the son would have been more inclined to have taken a genuine interest in the work of the farm, and would have been less reck- less of his worldly interests. As he explains, with characteristic candour and insight, " the great misfortune " of his " life was never to have an aim/' and his father's dislike only made him more careless of finding one. Even thus early he had " stirrings of ambition," but they " were the blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave." For years he had to concentrate his main attention merely on the completion of his " daily tale of bricks " ; and although, on the removal of the family in 1777 to the new farm of Lochlea in Tarbolton parish, some relief was obtained from the stress of poverty and the strain of labour, the immediate future revealed to him nothing regarding which it was possible or, if possible, worth while to form a hope. His exceptional intelligence and latent fervour of ambition only made his outlook seem the darker. "Thus," he adds, with his uncompromising regard for facts, (e abandoned of view or aim in life, with a strong appetite for sociability (as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark) and a constitutional hypochondriac taint which made me fly solitude : add to all these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish knowledge, EARLY MANHOOD 25 a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought, something like the rudiments of good sense, made me generally a welcome guest. So 'tis no great wonder that always ' where two or three were met together, there was I in the midst of them/ " Further, he mentions that as he had no interest in his labours except when he was "in actual exercise," he spent the evenings in fe the way after his own heart " ; and that was after the usual manner of country lads, to whom, he tells us, "the ardent hope, the stolen inter- view, the tender farewell, are the greatest and most delicious part of their enjoyments/' As for the poet's own particular heart, it was, he says, " completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up with some goddess or other " ; " and," he continues, with somewhat halting grammar, "like every other warfare in this world, I was sometimes crowned with success, and sometimes mortified with defeat/' All this is fully corrobor- ated by Gilbert, who states that his brother was constantly "the victim of some fair enslaver," and also that when once he had selected anyone for his attention he " instantly invested her with a stock of charms out of the plentiful stores of his imagination." The access of the passion was, moreover, marked by an "agitation of his mind and body " that excelled everything of the kind he "ever knew in real life." For the time 26 ROBERT BURNS being "one generally reigned paramount in his affections ; but as Yorick's affections flowed out towards Madame de L at the remise door, while the eternal vows of Eliza were upon him, so Robert was frequently encountering other attractions which formed so many underplots in the drama of his love." But all "those con- nections/' we are told, "were governed by the strictest rules of virtue and modesty." Violent though the attack was for the moment, it very soon reached its climax, and then subsided as the glamour cast by his poetic imagination began to dissolve. Apart from that glamour, the poet, as is evident from his song on "The Tarbolton Lasses," had thus early a very shrewd knowledge of the dispositions, gifts, and preten- sions of his female acquaintances. Yet with all his manifold sociality, and with " vive F amour ! et vive la bagatelle ! as his sole principles of action," his life was not so aimless as it seemed. On the contrary, as he wrote to his friend Thomas Orr, he was studying as well as he could "men, their manners and their ways," so that he shortly came to think, as he relates to Murdoch in 1783, that he seemed "to be one sent into the world to see and observe." As regards the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club, started, it may be at his instigation, in 1780, it was apparently intended to act as a partial restraint EARLY MANHOOD 27 on miscellaneous sociality, the purpose of the youthful founders being that, while they should forget their "cares and labours in mirth and diversion," they might not " transgress the bounds of innocence and decorum." The aim of those intelligent and honest-hearted youths was most laudable ; but the club with its well-meaning principles and its common - place round of de- bates can hardly have influenced appreciably the poet's future. Already as is manifest from a description by a fellow - clubman and fellow - versifier, David Sillar his individuality had began to render him conspicuous among his fellows ; and he was clearly quite aware of his own powers. Conscious of a somewhat striking per- sonality, and desirous of appearing to advantage in the eyes of rustic beauty, he wore at church the