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ROBERT BURNS.
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS.
" They say best men are moulded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad."
— Measure for Measure, Act v. Scene 1.
" Salve vetustse vitas imago
Et specimen venientis ^Evi." — G. Buchanan.
I.— INTRODUCTORY.
In a bibliography, scarcely inferior in variety to that which has
gathered around Shakespeare, there is a tract with the head-
ing, " Men who have failed." Its purpose is apparent ; we
can construct the sermon from the text, as Cuvier recon-
structed a monster from the inspection of a bone : but the
title, as applied, is false. Whatever Burns's merits or de-
merits as a man, the vital part of his career was a swift suc-
cess, and, what is of more moment, a lasting. Every decade
in which his presence recedes his power grows : his pas-
sionate strength has overleapt the barriers of his dialect.
Almost every British critic, during the last half century, has
pelted or hailed him : everything that should be said of him,
and everything that should not, has been said, often clumsily,
often disconnectedly, yet on the whole exhaustively ; so that
little remains but to correct conflicting exaggerations. Burns
has suffered from two sets of assailants. The " unco guid,"
who "compound for " social meanness and religious malice, by
A
2 ROBERT BURNS.
damning other things " they have no mind to," had a score
against him, which, during his life and after, they did their
best to pay : and they believed him to be worse than he
was because they wished it. The " unco " bad were keen to
exaggerate his weakness, that they might throw over their
own vulgar vices the shield of his great name. On the
other hand, the idolatry of a nation, prone to canonise its
illustrious dead, has oppositely erred. " No poet, from the
blind singer of Troy downwards, is his peer ; " " What would
become of the civilised world were his writings obliterated : " —
such are the common-places of festival speeches, of journalists
patriotically inspired. He has been worshipped, shouted
about, preached at, pointed to as a warning, held forth as an
example. " The roar of his drunkards " has proclaimed him
a saint; the grim moralist, to the zealot's joy, has denounced
him as the chief of sinners. It is as natural as harmless
that a recent accomplished biographer, selected on the
Heraclitean principle of contrasts, should sigh over his
" Socinian tendencies," and daintily regret the publication
of his quenchless satires : it is inevitable that a literary
censor, whose writings are sometimes models of style always
mirrors of complacency, should label his wood-notes as
hardly superfine. He has had plenty of praise, plenty
of blame, enough of " allowances," far more than enough of
patronage : he has rarely had — what few men have often
— simple justice.
" The work of Burns," says his first editor, " may be con-
sidered as a monument not to his own name only but to the
expiring genius of an ancient and independent nation." The
antithesis of our chief latinist better represents the attitude
of our chief poet, who was at once the last of the old and
the first of the new. He came in the autumn or evening of
our northern literature, but around him was the freshness of
the morning and the May. Like Chaucer, he stood on the
edge of two eras, and was a prophet as well as a recorder,
embalming and exalting legend and song, affronting and
rending inveterate superstitions ; the satirist as well as
the lyrist of his race. A Jacobite and a Jacobin, holding
A SUMMARY OF Ills CAREER AND GENIUS. ."3
out hands to Charlie over the straits and to Washington
across the Atlantic, the monument of his verse "vetustae
vitas imago" bears a beacon " venientis sevi." Pupil of
Ramsay, master of Tannahill, it is natural that Chloris
and Damon should linger in his pages beside Jean and Gavin
and Davie, and the beggars at Nanse's splore. Everyone
of judgment sees that his most underived and passionate
work was his best, that his fame rests most firmly on the
records of his wildest or freest moods ; more on the Songs
and the Satires and Tarn O'Shanter and the Cantata than
on the " Cottar's Saturday Night," But to realise his
relation to the thought and music of his country requires
a study of his antecedents. Our space confines us to a brief
statement of his historical position and an exhibition of his
character in a summary of his life.
Burns was an educated, but not a learned man, and he
drew next to nothing from our early literature. Of the old
Ballads, despite his residence in the border land, he made
comparatively little use. The seventeenth century had little
to give him ; when the strife of Covenanter and Cavalier
held the hearts and threatened the lives of men, the northern
Muses were dumb. Poetry was shrivelled under the frown
of Presbyteries. The stream of native song had been
flowing, under black weeds, till it came to light again in the
Jacobite minstrelsy, — where the spirit of the hills first makes
itself felt in the voices of the plain, — in the pastorals of
Eamsay, the fresh canvass of Thomson and Beattie, and
the sketches of native life by Pergusson. Prom these, his
generously acknowledged masters, Burns inherited much ;
most from the ill-starred genius of the last. The loves,
animosities, and temptations of the two poets were akin ;
they were both, almost to boasting, devotees of independence ;
both keen patriots, they were alike inspired with a livid
hate of their country's besetting sin, hypocrisy ; but there is,
on a smaller scale, the same difference between them that
there is between Chaucer and Shakespeare. " The Farmer's
Ingle " is a quaint picture of a rustic fireside north of
the Tweed, but " The Cottar " is a store of household words
4 ROBERT BURNS.
for every Scottish home in the nineteenth century; "Plain-
staines and Causey" prattle, witli playful humour, of the
freaks and follies of the society that moves over them ; but
about the bridges that span the Doon there is thrown the
moonlight of the fairies of the " Midsummer Night." In
greater measure, Burns was the heir of the nameless minstrels,
on whose ungraven tombs he throws a wreath of laurels wet
with grateful tears. But he likewise exalts them, idealising
their plain-spoken pathos or laughter, making their local
interests universal and abiding.
He was enabled to do so by the fact of his being inspired
by the spirit of the Future as well as of the Past. He lived
when the so-called " Komantic " literary movement had been
initiated by the publication of Percy's Eeliques, Macpherson's
Ossian, and the immortal forgeries of the most precocious
genius in our tongue. Burns never names Chatterton, —
probably because he could not read his masterpieces, — but
they have many points of contact. Both were emphatically
Bards, as opposed to the poets of culture by whom they
were, in the eighteenth century, almost exclusively preceded ;
both were "sleepless souls," but their themes lay far apart.
The mysteriously stranded child to whose dingy garret there
came visions of armies in the air, the flapping of ravens' wings,
the sound of seas in a tumult like that of Kubla Khan, is
the ancestor of Coleridge on his magic side : Burns, of
Wordsworth, to whom he bequeathed his pathetic interpreta-
tion of nature ; and of Byron, the inheritor of his " passions
wild and strong." They are together petrels of the storm
that, shaking "thrones, princedoms, powers, dominions," con-
verted Versailles into a moral Pompeii, and drove the classic
canons of art into a museum of antiquities. The "Freedom
dreste in blodde steyned veste" of the one is like the "stal-
wart ghaist" with the " sacred-poesie-Libertie" of the other.
But if the Eowley poems had any influence on Burns, it
came indirectly through Cowper, who may have borrowed
the Olney Hymn, "God moves in a mysterious way," from
Chatterton's, beginning "O God, whose thunder shakes the
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 5
sky," and handed on the same devotional mood to the
author of the prayer —
" O thou Great Being what Thou art
Surpasses me to know."
The same breath blows through diverse instruments that
have, as regards religion, the same note of scorn for insin-
cerity, and beneath it one major key of perplexity, awe, and
resignation. The defiance that rises in Queen Mab and the
Revolt of Islam, almost to the shrillness of a shriek, the
lurid light of the red star of Cain, belong to a later age.
William Cowper — a reed shaken with the wind, and yet
a prophet — a terror-stricken "castaway," and yet the most
conspicuous leader of a revolt, found in Scotland a vicegerent
greater than himself, — a mighty mass of manhood, who, free
from the intellectual fetters that bound, the ghastly clouds
that obscured his elder contemporary, struck more ringing
blows, and soared into a higher heaven.
Finally — jpac6 Mr Carlyle to the contrary — the condition
of our literature at the time was, on the whole, favourable to
the appearance of our greatest interpreter. It has been the
fashion to talk contemptuously of the men who, though with
different ideas of finish, reared many of the foundations upon
which we build ; but, if we except Poetry and Physical
Science, the eighteenth century produced most of what the
nineteenth is content to criticise. " In its latter half," says
Mr Charles Scott in a paper displaying rare insight and
sympathy, " Scotland was at the culmination of its intel-
lectual glory. It never stood higher relatively to the rest
of Europe." After supporting his assertion by the names of
Hume, Robertson, Reid, Stewart, and Adam Smith, he pro-
ceeds, "The Bench, the Bar, and the Pulpit were adorned by
men who, sometimes rough and quaint, were always vigorous
and original. We had in those days the greatest statesmen
Britain has seen . . . the approach of the French Revolu-
tion had stirred the blood of the people . . . their great
poet alone was wanting. The hour struck and the man
appeared."
() ROBERT BURNS.
1L— SUEVEY OF BUKNS' LIFE.
I. — First Period, Alloway, 1759 — 1766. {JEt. 1-7.)
Burns was qualified to be a national poet by his start
from the meeting of all the waters of his country's literature,
n*o less so by the circumstances of his birth and the grasp
of his genius. Scion of a family on the North-East, mem-
bers of which, by his own account, had shared the fortunes
of the Earl of Mar, he was born and lived in the South-
West among the descendants of the Covenanters. He was
a peasant more in virtue of his prevailing themes than by
his actual rank. Addressing every grade from the Prince
of Wales to roadside tramps, the " annals of the poor" are
dearest to the heart of one who was often by painful experi-
ence familiar with their sorrows. But Burns himself, save
latterly as a government official, never did a day's work for
others than himself and his family. His father's status as
a tenant farmer in the Lowlands was equivalent to that of
an English yeoman. His own position in society, in the
lower section of the middle class, went with his education
and his free spirit to make him as much at ease in the
reception rooms of the aristocracy as in the lanes of Mauch-
line. Everything conspired to make him what he was, a
national rather than a peasant poet. In one of the
passages in which he almost petulantly resents the claims
of rank, he speaks of his " ancient but ignoble blood." In
the same spirit Beranger, answering those who " criticise the
paltry de " before his name, rejoices in being " a very scamp
of common stamp." But both were only half in earnest, and
neither without some pride in their ancestors. Those of Burns
can be traced at least to the later years of the seventeenth
century, when they are found well settled in the Mearns. It
is worthy of note that the poet's grandfather, inspired by a
zeal which characterised his descendants, built the first school-
house in the district of his farm. His third son, William, born
in 1721, continued to reside in Kincardineshire till 1748,
when he migrated southwards as a gardener; in 1749 laying
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 7
out the Edinburgh meadows, and from 1750 onwards
similarly engaged in Ayrshire, till, having taken a lease of
seven acres in Alloway, he built on them, largely with his
own hands, the " auld clay biggin " of two rooms, to which,
in 1757, at the age of thirty-six, he brought home his
bride, Agnes Brown of Maybole. In this house — now
almost a Mecca to northern patriots — Robert, the first off-
spring of the marriage, was born on the 25th January 1759.
For the little record left of the cottage life at Alloway,
we are indebted to three sometimes conflicting authori-
ties: — Burns' letter (vol. iv. 4-20) to Dr Moore (Aug.
1787); that addressed to Mrs Dunlop by his brother
Gilbert ; and the reminiscences of his tutor, Mr John
Murdoch, a young man of rare accomplishments and
sagacity, to whom during their childhood, and much to
their profit, the education of the family was in large
measure committed. The autobiographic sketch is a strange
chequer of fancy, philosophy, and recklessness, written in
the sunshine of success, crossed by the shade of afflictions
and of follies, which the writer was simultaneously deplor-
ing and recommitting. It is written with great apparent
candour, and with the author's constant force of style ; the
facts, often lighted up by brilliancies of setting, are sometimes,
it may be, magnified in the haze of imagination. From the
blessing or bane of the excess of this faculty, Gilbert — the
only other junior member of the family who in a rapid
sketch calls for comment — was, in his maturity at least,
singularly free. An intelligent and canny Scot of enlarged
mind, he is studiously proper, respectable, and orthodox,
speaking in one strain of " an atheist, a demagogue, or any
vile thing." He is a more or less sympathetic apologist for
his brother's weaknesses ; but, in the interests of truth or of
popular feeling, he more than once attempts to disenchant
Robert's narrative of an element of romance. E.g. The poet
attributes the family migration southward to political causes,
describing his ancestors as " renting lands of the noble
Keiths of Marischal," as having had " the honour of sharing
their fate " and " shaking hands with ruin for what they
8 ROBERT BURNS.
esteemed the cause of their King and their country." Else-
where the same assertion reappears in verse : —
" My fathers that name have revered on a throne,
My fathers have fallen to right it ;
Those fathers would spurn their degenerate son,
That name should he scoffingly slight it."
Gilbert, on the alleged authority of a parish certificate, em-
phatically asserts that his father had " no concern in the
late wicked rebellion." Between the romance of the elder
and the caution of the younger brother we have, in this
instance, no means of deciding. A variation of more
interest appears in their diverse estimates of the charac-
ter of William Burness himself. There is nothing in the
poet's prose inconsistent either with the picture of the
Cottar, or the noble epitaph ending with Goldsmith's line —
"For e'en his failings leaned to Virtue's side." But of
these failings Robert was far from being piously unconscious.
" I have met with few," he says of his father, " who under-
stood 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." Elsewhere he complains
of being the victim of parental prejudice. Gilbert, on the
other hand, always defends his father, saying, " I bless
his character for almost everything in my disposition or
habits I can approve." " He was proud of Robert's genius,
but the latter was not amenable to controul," which indeed
appears to have been the fact. Genius seldom is amenable
to control : the same applies to dense stupidity. Murdoch,
writing from London in later years, is lavish in expressions
of love and veneration for his old employer, in whose two-
roomed cottage, a " tabernacle of clay, there dwelt a larger
portion of content than in any palace in Europe." " He
spoke the English language with more propriety than any
man I ever knew with no greater advantages. This had a
very good effect on the boys, who talked and reasoned like
men long before others. for a world of such ... he was
worthy of a place in Westminster Abbey." Allowing for
the exaggerations of filial piety and tutorial gratitude, we
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 9
gather that William Burness was, on the whole, as Mr
Carlyle describes him, a man worth going far to meet, of
that force of character which rises into originality, with
a thirst for knowledge and power of communicating it
alike remarkable, but defective in tact; none farther from
Macklin's Scotchman, for instead of " booing " he was
ostentatiously independent, manly to the core, and religious,
with a softened Calvinism, expressed in his Manual of Belief
(vide vol. iv. 341, and seq.), fond of speculation, within limits,
and keen in argument. In person he was above common
stature, thin and bent ; in essence honesty incarnate. The
secret of Scotland's greatness, says the Times, is oatmeal ;
a notorious champion of the Free Church says it is Sabba-
tarianism ; a zealous Presbyter, that it is hatred of Prelacy.
Does it not rely as much on the influence of a few men of
such character as we have described ? Murdoch's remaining
recollections of the quiet household, of the father who be-
queathed his proud, quick temper without the strong con-
trolling will, of the mother from whom Eobert inherited
his bright eyes and love of song, of the precocious boys, the
gravity of the future poet, and the gaiety of the douce
farmer, of the early love of books, and the integrity common
to them all, are our only reliable records of the life at
Alloway, unless we refer to this period the " warlock and
spunkie " stories of the old woman, — germs of the fancies
that afterwards conjured up an eerie " something " on the
Tarbolton road, and set the ruined kirk "ableeze" with the
most wonderful witch dance in literature.
II. — Second Period, Mount Oliphant, 1766 — 1777.
(ML 7-18.)
The happiest days of William Burness went by in the
clay cottage. Henceforth, as before, he wrought hard, and
practised, as he preached, economy, temperance, and persever-
ance, but the winds and tides of adversity were ruthless,
and he played a losing game. Desirous of cultivating land
on his own account, he obtained a lease of Mount Oliphant in
1765, and entered on residence in the following vear. The
10 ROBERT BURNS.
sad story of the bad farm, — " with the poorest soil under cul-
tivation," writes Gilbert in 1800, — of the scanty crops, the
inclement seasons, the death of the kind landlord, and the
insolent letters of the tyrannic factor has been often told,
best of all by Burns himself, whose character was, during
these twelve years, largely formed under influences partly
favourable, partly the reverse. At home the children con-
tinued to be trained up " in decency and order " by their
father, who, with two exceptions — Robert's fortnightly study
of French under Murdoch at Ayr, and some lessons in pen-
manship at Dalrymple — took upon himself the whole duty
of their education. This was conducted by candlelight in
the evenings when they had returned from their labour in
the fields, special attention being paid to arithmetic as a
secular, and exposition of the Scriptures as a religious basis.
To these lessons was added the stimulating effect of the
" good talk " in leisure hours with the few clever people of
the neighbourhood — Mrs Burns, though much occupied with
household matters, listening appreciatively — and the reading
aloud of some play of Shakespeare or other classic. Books
were William Burness' only luxury ; he never ranked a
love of them among the artificial wants he strove to dis-
courage, and his well-chosen stock, acquired by the scant
savings of the family or placed at their disposal by the
kindness of friends, was at starting the poet's greatest advan-
tage. His earliest favourites were the " Vision of Mirza "
and one of Addison's Hymns. Then followed the life of
Hannibal, lent by Murdoch, and the history of Sir William
Wallace, some years after borrowed from a village black-
smith. The first sent the boy strutting up and down the
room in an excess of martial enthusiasm that was far from
being one of the man's prevailing moods, breaking out
genuinely in only three of his later songs. The second,
doubtless the popular chap-book based on Blind Harry,
poured into his veins the " Scotch prejudice " to which he
owes so much of his hold over the somewhat self-sufficient
race of which he is at once the censor and the trumpeter.
Burns was born as Scott was born, before the age of the
shrivelling criticism-^" the spirit that says ' No ' " — that
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 1 1
has robbed us of (Joriolanus and Tell, and damped half the
fires of national fervour. " The greatest of the Plantage-
nets " was to him a bogie tyrant ; the firer of the Barns of
Ayr, a model of martyred chivalry ; and in singleness of
heart he chose a fine Sunday to worship in the Leglen
Wood, visiting the fabled haunts of his "heroic country-
man with as much devout enthusiasm as ever pilgrim did
the shrine of Loretto." Among other volumes, borrowed
or bought, on the shelves of Loan House were, besides good
manuals and grammars of English and French (in which
language he displayed remarkable proficiency), Mason's
Extracts, a collection of songs, Stackhouse's History of the
Bible, from which Burns picked up a fair amount of
ancient history, a set of Queen Anne letters, on the study
of which he began to write his own carefully and to keep
copies of them, the Spectator, Pope's Homer and after-
wards his other works, some of the novels of Kichardson
and Smollet, Ramsay, Hervey, with some plays of Shake-
speare and essays of Locke. To these were added at
Lochlea, Shenstone, Thomson, Fergusson, Mackenzie's " Man
of Feeling," Tristram Shandy — which he devoured at meals,
spoon in hand — with the Mirror, Lounger, &c, and later
Macpherson's " Ossian " and Milton. A good library for a
farm house even now, and, if scant as that of an author,
Burns had mastered it. He drew blood from everything
he read, e.g., the style of some of his letters is affected by
Sterne to a degree never enough remarked, that of others
equally by the English essayists. Above all, he was satu-
rated with the Bible and the Book of Songs, carrying them
with him for spare moments in the fields, and lingering over
them in his cold little room by night ; " carefully noting
the true, tender, sublime, or fustian," and so learning to be
a critic, while stirred bv emulation to become himself a
lyrist. His first verses were inspired by a calf love — inno-
cent prelude to many of various hues — for "Handsome
Nell," his partner in the labours of the harvest during his
fifteenth autumn, the tones of whose voice made his " heart
strings thrill like an (Eolian harp." Save the song, " I
dreamed I lay where flowers were springing," he wrote
12 KOBEKT BURNS.
nothing more of consequence till six, and little till ten
years later. His circumstances were fatal to precocious
authorship. The father and sons were fighting bravely
through their eleven lean years of struggle, ending in
defeat ; and were, with both physical and moral bad results,
overwrought. Work on land, in the open air, is in itself
more favourable to mental activity than the routine drudgery
of a teacher or literary hack ; but the labour to which the
young Burnses were inevitably subjected was both excessive
and premature. The poet was always a good and dexter-
ous workman, " at the plough, scythe, or reap-hook he
feared no competitor : " in the later days at Ellisland we
have testimony to his being able at a push to " heave a
heavier stone " than any of his " hands." But these early
efforts were drawing on his capital and exhausting his
fund of strength. At the age of thirteen he threshed
the corn.
" The thresher's weary flinging tree
The lea lang day had wearied me."
At fifteen he was the principal labourer. The family kept
no servant, and for several years butcher-meat was unknown
in the house. Unceasing toil brought Burns to his sixteenth
year. His robust frame overtasked, his patience was over-
tried ; despite bursts of buoyancy and the vague ambition
which he pathetically compares to the groping of the blind
Cyclops, his temper was often exasperated. His shoulders were
bowed, and his nervous system received a fatal strain; hence
long, dull headaches, palpitations and sullen fits of hypochon-
dria, with lurid lights from " the passionate heart," darting at
intervals through the cloud. " MiXay^oXixoi an h <s<pohpa ops$u."
Prosperity has its temptations, but they are nothing to those
of the poetic temperament goaded by pain within, and chilled
by apathy without. From toils which he associates with
those of a galley slave, and the internal fire craving for
sympathy in a freer atmosphere than even that of his home,
there sprung the spirit of revolt which soon made headway,
and passed not only the bars of formalism, but the limits of
rational self-restraint.
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AXD GENIUS. 1 '.'»
At this period, despite an awkward shyness and a morbid
dread of ridicule, the poet's social disposition — "the hypo-
chondriac taint " he calls it, that made him fly solitude —
had led him to form acquaintance with companions in or
near Ayr, some of whom had superior advantages, contem-
plated not without envy. " They did not know," he bitterly
remarks, " enough of the world to insult the clouterly
appearance of his plough-boy carcase." Two years after
he had committed his first " sin of rhyme," Burns, if we
accept his own chronology, spent the summer months at
Kirkoswald, studying mensuration. Here he came in con-
tact with some of the riotous scenes of that smuggling coast,
took part in them, found himself " no enemy to social
life," and learned " to look unconcernedly on a large tavern
bill." Here also, when " the sun entered Virgo " (i.e., in
August) he encountered a premonition of his master spell
in " a charming fillette," who, living next door to the school,
set him " off at a tangent " from his trigonometry.
Nothing came of the affair at the time, but several years
later (1783) Burns renewed his acquaintance with the girl
(Peggy Thomson), and from a rough former draft rewrote
in her honour, "Now westlin' winds," etc. Following the
same authority (his own) as to date, we must assign to the
early winter of the same year an event by which the
serenity of the domestic life — one phase of which is repre-
sented in the " Cottar's Saturday Night," the other in the
" Twa Dogs" — was interrupted. This event was the poet's
persistence, directly against his father's will, in attending a
country dancing-school. The motive he assigns, a desire
to give his manners a " brush," seems innocent enough ; but
the action was typical of his rebellion against the straiter
rules of the Scotch moral creed, and is therefore of more
importance than at first appears.
It is admitted that, in reaction from the levities of later
Romanism, the reformed religion in the north was at first
stamped with an excessive austerity, and that, in after days,
the long fight of Presbyterian Calvinism with the Episco-
palian Hierarchy helped to perpetuate the spirit in which
Knox himself, though by no means so fanatical as many of
14 ROBERT BURNS.
his followers, regarded a ball at Holyrood as " the dance of
the seven deadly sins." The overstrained moral code of
the Puritans, laughed out by the Eestoration, discarded as
visionary by the common sense of the Eevolution in England,
survived in Scotland in connection with the penances of the
Kirk, so familiar to the reader of Burns, and still lingers in
police regulations more socially inquisitorial than those of
any other civilized country. The attempt to "deal with"
every form of human frailty as a legal offence may be laud-
able in design; in practice it is apt to generate hypocrisy,
deceit, and even crime, as a means of escape from exposure.
But the stricter party of the Scotch Kirk, during the
eighteenth century, not content with publicly branding the
sins, set its face against the amusements of the people ; it
tried to keep them not only sober and chaste, but constantly
sombre, to close the theatres, to shut the barns, fine the
fiddlers, and set their melodies to psalms. Under the most
depressing circumstances, Nature will have her way. From
the gloom of a stern creed within, of inclement skies without,
the Scotch peasantry sought relief in vocal music, cultivated
the more eagerly that instrumental was banished from the
kirks, in whisky, and in dancing. The Reformation for two
centuries in our country stifled the other arts, but not that
of Eizzio. Music triumphed over the spirit of the creed of
Calvin, as it is now encroaching on the precepts of Penn.
The fire in the heart of the Scotch peasantry, unextinguished
by all the dry ashes of the Catechism, found vent in love
songs — many of those current before the coining of their
great minstrel, of worse than doubtful taste — in which they
are tenfold more prolific than the gayer French; in rural as-
signations, where passion too often set at nought the terrors
of the cutty-stool, and in the village " splore," for which
the dancing-school was a preparation. " This is," says Dr
Currie, in his liveliest passage, worth quoting as a comment
on many of our author's poems, " usually a barn in winter,
and the arena for the performers a clay floor. The dome
is lighted by candles stuck in one end of a cloven stick,
the other being thrust into the wall. Young men and
A SUMMARY OF HIS CABEEB AND GENIUS. 1 5
women will walk many miles to these country schools,
and the instant the violin sounds, fatigue seems to vanish,
the toil-worn rustic becomes erect, his features brighten
with sympathy, every nerve seems to thrill with sensation,
and every artery to vibrate with life." Such was the scene
from which William Burness wished to keep back the poet,
and from which the poet would not be kept back. It is
a wise thing to multiply innocent pleasures, the worst
policy to restrict them. Unfortunately in seeking an in-
nocent pleasure, Burns was made guilty of a disobedience,
and resented it by a defiance inevitable to his nature.
In taking his first step to be the interpreter of a nation,
he had to cease to be a dutiful son. He broke the bonds
that would not stretch, and soon revelled in his freedom
as a wild colt in a meadow. From this crisis, he began
to find himself ; his virgin bashfulness was too rapidly
" brushed " away ; his native eloquence gushed forth like a
liberated stream ; in every society he found himself the
light of conversation and the leader of debate ; and in his
hours of leisure beyond the walls of his home, whether by
a dyke-side or in an inn parlour, was surrounded by admir-
ing or astonished groups • who confided to him their affairs
of the heart, and obtained his assistance in their wooing.
At this period, ere reaching "green eighteen," he himself
began to manifest a precocious " penchant a l'adorable moitie
du genre humain" — "My heart was completely tinder, and
was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other." Ac-
cording to Gilbert, Eobert " idealized his women perpetu-
ally:" but he was as fickle as Sterne, and through life found
it easier to adore a new mistress than to put on a new coat :
a versatility often characteristic of the poetic temperament.
HI. — Third Period, Lochlea, 1777 — 1784. (2EL 18-25.)
William Burness attempted to leave Mount Oliphant at the
end of a six years lease, i.e., after a residence of five and
a-half years, 1771 ; but, failing, remained five and a-half
years longer, at the expiration of which he contrived to
1 U ROBERT BURNS.
reserve means and credit to secure the tenancy of Lochlea,
whither the family removed on Whitsunday 1777, and
where, for the first three years of their occupancy, they
seem to have fairly thriven. Of this space of time there
is little record: to its close belong the poet's letters to
Ellison Begbie — a young woman, understood to be the
Mary Morrison of his song, to whom he paid his addresses
with a view to marriage, but who, after seriously entertain-
ing them, to his grave discomfiture, rejected his suit. In
1780 the brothers established a Bachelors' Club, in which a
variety of social subjects were discussed, though under some
restrictions, with sufficient freedom and zest to stimulate the
ingenuity and sharpen the wits of the members. It appears
that Eobert, always ambitious of shining, prepared himself
beforehand for the debates. The next year of his life was
in more than one respect disastrous. Having been in the
habit of raising flax on a portion of his father's ground, it
occurred to him to go to Irvine to learn to dress it. For
some time he attacked his new trade with heart and hope,
and, if we may judge by the letter to his father of Dec.
1781, lived a strictly frugal and abstinent life: but as they
were giving a welcome carousal to the New- Year (1782),
the shop, in which he had combined with one of his mother's
relations, took fire, and Burns was left " like a true poet,
without a sixpence." Smarting under this loss, feeling himself
jilted at once by Ellison and by fortune, he went through
the usual despairs, and resorted to the too common consola-
tions. Meeting with others of the class of seafaring men
he had encountered at Kirkoswald, his eloquence, raised to a
feverish heat, shed a lustre over their wild thoughts and
ways. By one of those, a Mr Eichard Brown, whose
romantic adventures captivated his fancy, he was now
for the first time — by how many not the last were hard
to tell — led to " bound across the strid " of what is techni-
cally called virtue. We have here no space, had we in-
clination, to pry into the details of the story, nor the
continual repetitions of it, which marked and marred his
career. Home again with a troubled conscience, and a love
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENU'S. 17
for company unworthy of him, he found in the Masonic
Lodge at Tarbolton an institution unhappily well-suited
to his weakness for being first in every circle. In the
festivals of that guild he could defy competition : the
brethren, justly proud of their new deputy-master, joined
with a right good will in the ballad of John Barleycorn, and
shouted till " the kebars sheuk " over the chorus of " The
Big-bellied Bottle." Nevertheless these years were not
barren. Before going to Irvine, Burns had written "Ye
Cessnock Banks " and " My Nannie : " he brought back
from it his early religious pieces, and the volume of
Fergusson which first fired him with the definite ambition
of being himself a poet.
Between 1781-83 were written the "Lament for Mailie,"
" Winter : a Dirge," " Eemorse," and others in similar strain ;
also a number of songs, the best known being " The Eigs of
Barley " and " Green grow the rashes." These were ad-
dressed to various objects ; some former flames, as Kirk-
oswald Peggy, again flit across the horizon, others may have
been imaginary. One might as well undertake to trace all
the originals of Horace's or Herrick's fancy as those of
Burns', for, when he became famous, even married women
contended to have sat to him for their portraits. The
passion in these songs is more lively than intense, their
charm is in the field breeze that blows through them as
freshly as in the days of Chaucer. A love for the lower
forms of social life was the poet's besetting sin, — Nature
his healing power. He was fortunate in being placed amid
the scenes best suited to nourish a genius which fed on
the meadows and glades round the bends of the Ayr, as a
bee feeds on flowers, and had no affinity to mountain tops
on the one hand, or to cities on the other. Living in full
face of the Arran hills, he never names them. He takes
refuge from the ridges of Ben Goil and Ben Gnuiss among
the woods of Ballochmyle, and in the spirit which inspired
his "Mouse" and his "Daisy," turns out of his path,
fearing to " disturb the little songsters of the grove."
Similarly Chaucer, who travelled in Italy, names neither
B
18 ROBERT BUHNS.
Alp nor Apennine. Each found his " cheer in the bright-
ness utterly of the glad sun." The gloom of Burns was
not by lonely tarn or " steep frowning summit," but in the
snow-drift that starves the cattle on the lowland moor,
and the winter wind that is like man's ingratitude. A
country life saved him as far as he was saved ; two seasons
of a city made it stale to him, and he perished in a county
town. With the sweetness of the fields came the benign
influences of Coila, to which he thus refers : — " My pas-
sions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils,
till they got vent in rhyme, and then the conning over
my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet." Here the
lyrist of the last century anticipates the great mosaic-
worker of the present —
" But for the unquiet heart and brain
A use in measured language lies,
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics numbing pain."
In 1783 the poet, beginning to realise the chances of his
fame, commenced his first Common-Place Book, " Observa-
tions, hints, songs, scraps of poetry, &c " — it concludes
October 1785, with a warning against his own errors (set.
24-26). The second, begun April 9, 1787, ends August
1790 (ret. 28-31). They are both of considerable bio-
graphical and literary interest.
Meanwhile at the farm affairs were kept going only by
strict economy and hard labour, and when a dispute about
the terms of the lease resulted in an adverse decision it
broke the old man's heart. He died (Feb. 13, 1784, ?et.
63) full of sorrows and apprehensions for the gifted son,
who wrote for his tomb in Alloway the famous epitaph, and
afterwards applied to him the lines of Beattie —
" Is it for this fair virtue oft must strive
With disappointment, penury, and pain ? "
Eobert and Gilbert lingered at Lochlea for some time
longer, but, when the crash came, they were only able, by
claiming arrears of wages on their father's estate, to rescue
enough to start in joint-tenancy at Mossgiel, about a mile
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 19
from Mauchline, whither, about Whitsunday, they migrated
with their mother and the rest of the family.
IV. — Fourth Period, Mossgiel, 1784 — 1788. (jEL 25-29.)
The brothers entered on their new lease with brave hearts,
Eobert, in a resolute mood, calculating crops, attending
markets, and determined, " in spite of the world, the flesh, and
the devil, to be a wise man," but the results of bad seed the
first year, and a late harvest the second, " overset " his " wis-
dom." The family seemed to flit from one mound in Ayrshire
to another : their new abode also lay high, and the snow dur-
ing four severe winters was deep on its cold wet clay : conse-
quently the outcome was so scanty that they had to give up
part of their bargain, and surrender some of their stock ;
but they had a kind landlord, to whom they were probably
indebted for their ability to struggle on, and abandon the
idea of another migration. No one has moralised better on
" the uses of adversity " than Burns ; few so finely as when
he says that misfortunes " let us ken oursel' : " yet none
more prone, when the pinch came, to blame his evil star,
and to seek shelter from the world's censure and his own
under " overwhelming circumstances." We have, however,
the direct testimony of Gilbert to his steadfastness in one im-
portant respect — " His temperance and frugality were every-
thing that could be desired." The effect of prevalent mis-
conception on this point is visible, even in Mr Carlyle's, in
many respects, incomparable essay. The poet had at Kirk-
oswald and Irvine learned to drink, and he was all his life
liable to social excesses, but it is unfair to say that " his
character for sobriety was destroyed."
Most of his best work was done at Mossgiel, and in-
spired by the country around, or in Mauchline itself. This,
the most suggestive of his haunts, has suffered less than most
places from railway, or pit, or mine, or the importunity of pro-
fessional showmen. A new road has been made through the
quiet village, and a new steeple set in the midst of it without
20 ROBERT BURNS.
doing much to mar its homeliness. The Poet, whose renown
beyond the Atlantic brought hither Nathaniel Hawthorne, still
haunts the streets. Our eyes may yet rest upon the Priory,
and on the Corse, where he found the girl, who was his fate,
hanging up clothes to dry. We have access to the crib in
the Back Causeway to which he brought her home, and to
the alehouse of Nanse Tinnock. Whence, through the
churchyard, by the graves of the twins and the Armours, of
Daddy Auld and his " black bonnet," — William Fisher, — of
the good Gavin and the ill-fated Margaret Kennedy, between
the site of Moodie's tent and the lunching booths of the
Holy Fair, we come to that of Johnny Dow's " Arms," with
its " roaring trade " and the windows, from which the lovers
beckoned across the lane. We pass on the other side to
Poosie Nansie's howff, where " the vera girdle rang " with
the wildest of vagrant revels, on which we can almost see
Burns interloping with Iris cronies Bichmond and Smith, or
" setting up " the Cowgate with " Common-sense " Mackenzie,
or loitering along the main with Lapraik and Kennedy. We
picture him taking the east road and coming over " the
drucken steps" to the race-course, where (in April 1784 or
'85, v. Vols. I. and IV.) he first met " the jewel " of the " six
proper young belles ;" and so back by the upland fields to
watch the gloamin' growing grey over the Galston moors ;
or the south to Catrine, where he was entertained and recog-
nised by Dugald Stewart ; or another to the Whitefoords at
Ballochmyle ; or another to Coilsfield, " the Castle o' Mont-
gomerie," whose banks and braes yet blossom with his name,
to call on his early patron, afterwards the Earl, Sir Hugh.
Lastly, we loiter down the Faile till it trickles into the
Ayr, by a grove more poetically hallowed than the fountain
of Vaucluse or Julie's bosque. There is no spot in Scotland
so created for a modern idyl, none leaves us with such
an impression of perfect peace as this, where the river,
babbling over a shelf of pebbles to the left, then hushed
through " birch and hawthorn," and Narcissus willows, mur-
muring on, heedless of the near and noisy world, keeps the
memory green of our minstrel and his Mary.
A SUMMAEY OF His CAREER AXI) GENIU& 21
Bums' life during the years 1784-86 was mainly con-
cerned with three matters — a keen religious controversy,
the intimacy that resulted in his marriage, the full blaze
and swift recognition of his genius.
The poet, brought up like his countrymen in the Calvin-
istic theology, was by nature and circumstance soon led to
question and " puzzle " the tenets of his ancestors. Proud
of his polemic skill, and shining " in conversations between
sermons," he at Irvine, if not before, was familiarised
with "liberal opinions" in speculation in connection with
laxity in life ; he continued to hold them in better com-
pany.
Ayrshire had been, for some time, the headquarters of a
Theological Conservatism, often combined with Radical
Politics ; but, during this period, several of the pulpits were
occupied by men affected by the wider views prevailing in
the literary circles of the capital, where Polite Literature,
seldom on close terms with Fanaticism, was represented by
Robertson, and Blair, and Beattie, and Mackenzie. The
clergymen of the " New Licht," or Moderate party, were,
compared with their antagonists, men of " light and leading,"
learning and manners. They read more, wrote better, and
studied their fellows from various points of view. Scholars
and gentlemen, personally without reproach, they believed
not only in good works, but occasionally in good cheer, made
allowances for sins of blood, and were inclined to " gently scan
their brother man, still gentler sister woman." The representa-
tives of the " Auld Licht " party, on the other hand, were more
potent in the pulpit. M'Kinlay and Moodie, — Black Jock
Russell and Peebles, Father Auld, and Steven " The Calf,"
never shot over the heads of the people by references to Aris-
totle's Ethics or Cicero's Offices : they charmed the mob by
the half physical excitement of vehement words and vulgar
action : knotty points of faith, which their opponents were apt
to slur, they cleared at once " wi' rattlin' and wi' thumpin',"
and when patrons, like Glencairn, being men of culture,
began in their appointments to be influenced by the regard
22 ROBERT BURNS.
of like for like, they raised against them the cry of
" Patronage " —
" Come join your counsels and your skills
To co we the lairds ; "
a cry, so well chosen in a democratic country that, despite
Bacon's " exceptis rebus divinis," despite Burns' comment —
" And get the brutes the power themsels
To choose their herds,"
it has, after a century's fight, with results yet to be seen,
carried the day. Few criticisms on the poet have done
justice to his friends the Moderates. Liberal conservatives,
with excessive " Economy," as is their wont, have passed
the question by. The orators and pamphleteers of that off-
shoot of the Church, whose name is a masterpiece, almost a
miracle, of misnomenclature, have been left free to rail at
large at a body of men, on the whole, among the best of their
age. Maligned as " mundane," because they looked on the
round world as a place to live, not merely to die in ; and
held to be " coarse-minded " because they did not become
hysterical, the historian will give them the credit of helping
to keep the country sane. That these men appreciated,
esteemed, and invited Burns to their houses has of course
been lamented : even the philosopher and guide of John
Sterling says the poet learned " more than was good for
him " at the tables of the New Licht, but it is unjust
to weight them, on the ground of unauthenticated anec-
dotes, with the responsibility of his already formed opinions.
Accomplished Broad-Church clergymen may have pointed
some of the arrows in his quiver, but it was the indecorum
of his adversaries and loyalty to his friends that set them
flying. By all accounts his landlord, Gavin Hamilton, was of
the salt of the earth, upright, genial, "the puir man's friend,"
himself in word and deed a gentleman; but he openly espoused
the liberal cause, and the Bev. Mr Auld, a person, says Cromek,
" of morose and malicious disposition," having had a feud with
Hamilton's father, sought every occasion of venting his spite
on the son, whose child he refused to christen, for the follow-
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 23
ing reasons : — Hamilton was seen on horseback and ordered
his gardener to dig a few potatoes (for which the gardener
was afterwards ecclesiastically dealt with) on the Lord's
Day, he was heard to whistle on a Fast Day, and said
" damn it " before Mr Auld's very face. High social posi-
tion, stainless life and benevolence were as nothing against
the fact that he played at cards, and on Sundays only went
once to church ; the straiter sect already regarded him
with venomous looks. Kobert Aitken, another staunch
friend whose acquaintance Burns made at the Castle,
and to whom he dedicated "The Cottar's Saturday Night,"
on similar grounds, came in for his share of the same
narrow virulence. The poet, watching his opportunity,
found it on one of the frequent occasions when the practice
of those severe censors shamed their precept. Pecuniary
differences are touch-stones of religious profession, and two
shining Auld Licht divines, being at variance as to their
parochial bounds, abused each other, in open court, with more
than average theological indecency.
" Sic twa — O do I live to see't,
Sic famous twa should disagree,
An' names like villain, hypocrite,
Ilk ither ge'en,
While new-light herds with laughin' spite
Say neither^ lee'in."
In this wise, Burns struck from the shoulder, and seizing
on Pope's lacerating lines —
" Blockheads with reason wicked wits abhor,
But fool with fool is barbarous civil war,"
launched at the Pharisees his " Twa Herds, or Holy Tulyie."
By this piece, towards the close of 1784, his reputation as a
satirist, next to that of a lyrist his title deed to fame, was
made at a stroke. No wonder the liberals, whose weakness
lay in lack of demagogic art, clapped their hands and drank
their claret, with added relish " upon that day " ! Here was
a man of the people, speaking for the people, and making
the people hear him, fighting their battle in a manner
24 ROBERT BURNS.
hitherto unknown among their ranks. The first shot fired,
the guns of the battery rattled and rang, volley on volley.
" Holy Willie's Prayer," with the Epistles to Goudie, Simp-
son, and M'Math, "The Holy Fair," besides "The Jolly
Beggars " and the " Address to the Deil," inspired in part at
least by the same spirit, were written in 1785. To the next
year belong " the Ordination," the " Address to the Unco
Guid," " The Calf," and the " Dedication to Hamilton," — a
sheaf which some of the admirers of the poet's softer mood
would fain pluck out of his volume and cast like tares
into the oven. They fail to perceive that, for good or ill,
they represent as essential a phase of his genius as the
lighter characters of the Canterbury Tales do that of Chaucer.
Burns' religious satires are an inalienable part of his work ;
though, for some years after his Edinburgh success, the
fire which prompted them smouldered, it sends out continual
sparks in his letters, and three years later, on the prosecution
of his friend M'Gill, it blazed into the fierce blast of " The
Kirk's Alarm."
" Orthodox, orthodox, wha believe in John Knox,
Let me sound an alarm to your conscience ;
There's a heretic blast has been blawn in the West,
That what is no sense, must be nonsense."
A keen adversary and unscrupulous controversialist
admits that these lines, once sent abroad, cannot be sup-
pressed by Bowdlerism. " Leviathan is not so tamed." No,
nor can Michael's flaming sword be so blunted. It is hard
to say what the writer might not have done for religious
liberty in Scotland, had not the weight of his judgment been
lessened, as the cogency of Milton's views on Divorce, by
the fact that he was, in part at least, fighting for his own
hand. Speculative opinion has less to do with some aspects
of morality than is generally supposed ; but it was unfor-
tunate for the poet that when the Kirk-Session of Mauchline
met to look over their artillery they found, by his own con-
fession, a weak point in his armour.
No biography of Burns can be complete that does not
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 25
discuss with some detail the delicate matters connected with
his relation to the other sex; but, in the slight survey to
which we are confined, it must he enough to glance at the
main facts and draw an inference. Philosophical moralists
have, with considerable force, asserted that the root of all
evil is selfishness ; but in practice this takes two directions
so distinct that they mark two distinct types of evil, the
one exhibited in various forms of dishonesty, hypocrisy,
meanness, or fraud ; the other in incontinence of speech, of
diet, or in relations of sex. In the worst type, e.g., that of
Richardson's Lovelace, that of the deliberate seducer and
deserter, they are combined. The chaste commercial rogue,
who gives tithes of his plunder, is, as a rule, too tenderly
dealt with by the Church ; the man — unfairly not the
woman — who yields to every gust, is perhaps too tenderly
dealt with by the World. Burns, it must be admitted, was
in this respect emphatically " passion's slave," and yet a
nation ostentatiously proud of its morality wears him in
its " heart of hearts." He was more reckless in his loves
than Lord Byron, almost as much so as King David ; but he
was never treacherous, and, in contrast with the sickly
sentimentalist Eousseau, he never sought to shirk the
consequences of his misdeeds. When accordingly, in
November 1784, his " Dear bought Bess," the result of a
liaison during the last days of Lochlea, made her appearance,
she was hailed in " The Welcome " with a sincere affection,
brought up in the family and shared their fortunes. This
event brought Burns within the range of ecclesiastical
censure, which, considering that it was an established custom,
not to be waived out of respect even for the person of a poet,
he too keenly resented. Shortly before or after, he was
implicated in another affair with a more serious result.
It is dogmatism to pretend certainty as to the date of
his first meeting with his Jean, depending as it does
on the original presence or interpolation of a stanza in
the Epistle to Davie ; but only in the last month of
1785 must their intimacy have culminated. Mr Armour,
a well-to-do master mason, and strict " Auld Licht,"
20 ROBERT BURNS.
who hated freedom of thought and speech when com-
bined with poverty, from the first, set himself against the
courtship as a prelude to an undesirable alliance. Burns
was accordingly driven to contract a clandestine marriage by
acknowledging the girl in writing as his wife ; a form still
valid. When, however, their relation was discovered, the
incensed parents, with a disregard of her honour which
forfeits their claim to our respect, persuaded her to destroy
her " lines " and repudiate her bargain. By this step,
assigned to April 13, 1786, and the transgressor's second
appearance, July 9, on the bad eminence of the stool of
repentance, with a view to obtain a certificate of bachelor-
ship, both parties — mistakenly as lawyers now maintain —
seem to have thought that the irregular alliance was
annulled. The poet gave vent to his outraged feelings in
"The Lament" and the last stanza of "The Daisy," and
finding himself out of friends and favour, holding that
" hungry ruin had him in the wind," gave up his share of
the Farm, resolved to seek refuge in exile, and accepted
a situation as bookkeeper to an estate in Jamaica. The
Armour's rejecting his overtures of reconciliation and threat-
ening him with legal proceedings, put spurs to his intent ; he
hurried on the publication of his poems, and with the pro-
ceeds bought a steerage passage in a ship to sail from
Greenock on the 1st September.
Burns expected a wife to go with him or to follow
him ; but it was not Jean. Nothing in his career is
so startling as the interlineation of his loves ; they played
about him like fire-flies ; he seldom remembered to be off
with the old before he was on with the new. Allured
by two kinds of attraction, those which were mainly sensual
seem scarcely to have interfered with others of a higher
strain. It is now undoubted that his white rose grew up
and bloomed in the midst of his passion-flowers. Of his
attachment to Mary Campbell, daughter of a Campbelton
sailor, and sometime nurse to the infant son of Gavin
Hamilton, he was always chary of speech. There is little
record of their intimacy previous to their betrothal on the
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 27
second Sunday, the 14th of May 1786, when, standing
one on either bank of the Faille, they dipped their hands
in the brook, and holding between them a Bible, — on the
two volumes of which half obliterated inscriptions still
remain, — they swore everlasting fidelity. Shortly after
she returned to her native town, where " Will you go to
the Indies, my Mary ? " and other songs were sent to her.
Having bespoken a place in Glasgow for Martinmas, she
went in the autumn to Greenock to attend a sick brother,
and caught from him a fever which proved fatal at some
date before October 12, when her lair was bought in
the West Kirkyard, now, on her account, the resort of
pilgrims. Mrs Begg's story of Burns receiving the news of
her death has been called in question ; but how deep the
buried love lay in his heart is known to every reader of his
verse. After flowing on in stillness for three years, it broke
forth as the inspiration of the most pathetic of his songs —
" Thou lingering star with lessening ray,"
composed in the course of a windy October night, when
musino; and watching the skies about the corn-ricks at
Ellisland. Three years later, it may have been about the
same harvest time, even on the same anniversary, the re-
ceding past, with a throng of images, sad and sweet, again
swept over him, and bodied itself forth in the immortal
lyric —
" Ye banks and braes and streams around the Castle o' Montgomery,"
which is the last we hear of Highland Mary.
Meanwhile Burns had arrived at the full consciousness
of being a poet, and, though speaking with almost unbe-
coming modesty of his rank, in comparison with Eamsay
and Fergusson, had, by his own statement, as high an
opinion of his work as he ever entertained. His fertility
during the years 1785-86, more especially in the period
between November 1785 and April 1786, has rarely been
equalled. Among the pieces conceived behind the plough,
and transcribed before he went to sleep in his garret over
the " but and ben " of the farm-house, in addition to
28 ROBERT BURNS.
his anti-Calvinistic satires, and Dr Hornbrook, of more local
interest, were "The Twa Dogs," "The Author's Prayer,"
"The Vision," and "The Dream," "Halloween," "The
Farmer's Address to his Mare," " The Cottar's Saturday
Night," The two Epistles to Davie and three to Lapraik,
the lines to a Mouse and to a Daisy, " Scotch Drink," "Man
was made to mourn," and "The Jolly Beggars." These,
with the exception of the last, along with some of his
most popular songs, were included in his first volume.
Preparations for publishing it at Kilmarnock began in
April; it appeared on July 31st under the auspices of
Hamilton, Aitken, and other of his friends. The result
was an almost instant success, if not a thorough apprecia-
tion. Of an edition of 600, at the end of the month only
41 copies remained unsold. This epitome of a genius, so
pronounced and so varied, expressing itself so tersely and
yet so clearly — for there was not a word in the volume
that any Scotch peasant who could read could fail to
understand — took its audience by storm, and set all the
shores of the West in a murmur of acclaim. It only
brought to the author £20 direct return, but it introduced
him to the literary world. Mrs Dunlop of Dunlop began
with him the correspondence which testifies to a nine years'
friendship. Dugald Stewart invited him to his house at
Catrine, where he met Lord Daer, and found his first ex-
perience of the aristocracy a very pleasant one. Somewhat
later H. Mackenzie gave him a favourable review in the
Lounger, extracts from which were copied into the London
papers. Of Stewart, Burns speaks at all times with affec-
tionate respect ; the philosopher bears as emphatic
testimony to the favourable impression made by the first
appearance of the poet, and to the high qualities of mind
which he exhibited in their frequent walks together about
the Braid Hills in the subsequent spring — to the inde-
pendence of his manners, a consciousness of worth devoid
of vanity, and the fluency, precision, and originality of his
speech. " He had a very strong sense of religion, and
expressed deep regret at the levity with which he had
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 29
heard it treated in some convivial meetings." "All the
faculties of his mind were equally vigorous." " From his
conversation I should have pronounced him fitted to excel
in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his
abilities. He was fond of remarking on character, shrewd,
and often sarcastic, but extravagant in praise of those he
loved. Dr Eobertson thought his prose, considering his
education, more remarkable than his verse."
From August till the middle of November, during which
time he had written "The Brigs of Ayr," "The Lass of
Ballochmyle," " Tarn Samson's Elegy," and other minor pieces,
preparations for the poet's departure were proceeding. On
the 26th of September he writes to his Montrose cousin
that it will not take place till after harvest ; but, a month
later, he is still bent on the Indies. Coming back over
Galston Moor from a visit to that excellent Moderate (his
friend, Dr Laurie of Loudon), he wrote " The gloomy night
is falling fast," ending " Farewell, the bonie banks of Ayr."
In the interval, incited by Mr Hamilton to venture on a
second edition, he was discouraged by the temerity of the
Kilmarnock printer ; but an enthusiastic letter, transmitted
by Laurie, from the blind poet, Dr Blacklock, and the pros-
pect of the support of the Earl of Glencairn, induced him to
stay his steps and try his fortune in the Scotch metropolis.
He who had sung "Freedom and whisky gang together," was
not to be an overseer of slaves, but an exciseman. He left
Mauchline on a pony on the 27th, and reached Edinburgh
on the 28 th November, with passports that promised him a
fair start, in the " pastures new," on which he now, in his
twenty-ninth year, broke ground.
V. — Fifth Period, Edinburgh, Nov. 1786 — May 1788.
(jEL 28-30.)
In the northern capital of these days there was more of
Auld Reekie, less of Modern Athens ; the iron-road had not
replaced the Nor-Loch, the main thoroughfare ran down from
30 ROBERT BURNS.
the Castle to Holyrood, and the banks of the valley were
undisfigiired by domineering hotels or the College towers
which have roused Mr Ruskin's wrath. The first sight of a
city, moreover, is as attractive to a countryman, as the first
glimpse of the sea to an inlander. We can easily imagine
that the poet, attracted alike by the picturesque grandeur of
the place and its historical associations, spent the first days
after his arrival in wandering about the quaint old streets,
looking into shop windows, rambling up Arthur Seat, and
gazing over the Frith on the Lomonds. We can fancy him
taking off his hat at the threshold of Allan Ramsay's barber
shop, or seeking out the " narrow house " of Fergusson, in
Canongate Kirk, and kneeling to kiss the sod on which he,
at his own expense, erected the memorial to his neglected
predecessor. But if he kept apart for a time from society,
it was from choice not necessity ; armed with introductions
to Dr Blacklock and the Earl of Glencairn, the favour of Mr
Stewart, and that of his amiable critic, Mr Mackenzie, secured,
and the literary world of the place on tip-toe to see him, he
soon became acquainted with Drs Blair and Gregory, Mr Frazer
Tytler, Henry Erskine, Lord Monboddo (who had vaguely
guessed what Mr Darwin is generally held to have proved),
and his daughter, the fair theme of several of his minor
verses. In short, before a week was over, he found himself,
in his own words, suddenly " translated from the veriest
shades of life " to the centre of the most distinguished circles.
He was by the scholars of that brilliant time, by the bench
and the bar, by fashion and by beauty, welcomed, courted,
feasted, and admired. " The town," wrote Mrs Cockburn
towards the close of the year, " is at present all agog with
the ploughman poet. . . He has seen Duchess Gordon and
all the gay world. His favourite for looks and manners is
Bess Burnett, no bad judge indeed." It has been suggested
that the sudden change of life must have been prejudicial to
his health ; but no man was ever less spoiled by adulation.
When Burns first saw the mental and social aristocracy
of the land, and they saw him, they met on equal terms.
" In the whole strain of his bearing," we are told, " he mani-
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS.
3*1
festcd his belief that in the society of the most eminent men
of his nation he was exactly where he was entitled to be ;
hardly deigning to Hatter them by exhibiting a symptom of
being nattered." " I never saw a man," says Scott, "in
company with his superiors in station or information more
perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of
embarrassment. His address to females was extremely
deferential, with a turn either to the pathetic or the
humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. . . .
He was much caressed in Edinburgh, but the efforts made
for his relief were extremely trifling." With all his essential
modesty, the poet must have felt a glow of triumph at the
impression made by his matchless conversational power,
according to Lockhart, who had the reports of auditors,
" the most remarkable thing about him." The Duchess of
Gordon said he was the only man who ever " carried her off
her feet ; " Eamsay of Ochtertyre, " I have been in the com-
pany of many men of genius, but never witnessed such
flashes of intellectual brightness as from him, the impulse of
his moment, sparks of celestial fire ; " and the brilliant
Maria Eiddell, the best friend of his later days, " I hesitate
not to affirm — and in vindication of my opinion I appeal to
all who had the advantage of personal acquaintance with
him — that poetry was actually not his forte . . . none have
ever outshone Burns in the charm — the sorcery I would
almost call it — of fascinating conversation. . . . The rapid
lightnings of his eye were always the harbingers of some
flash of genius. . . . His voice alone could improve upon
the magic of Ins eye." The poet went home from assem-
blages of learning, wit, and grace, where he had been posing
professors, arguing down lawyers, and turning the heads of
reigning beauties, to share with his friend Eichmond, then a
writer's apprentice, a crib in Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket,
for which they paid together three shillings a week. Not
imfrequently he dropped in by the way upon gatherings of
another sort, knots of boon companions met where the wine
went faster and the humour was more akin to that of the
Tarbolton Lodge. For the chief of these free-thoughted and
3*2 II0BE11T BURNS.
loose-worded clubs, nicknamed that of the Crochallan
Fencibles, he afterwards compiled the collection of unconven-
tional songs* — some amusing, others only rough — known as
the " Merry Muses," to which he contributed a few pieces.
Like Chaucer, he owed half his power to the touch of
Bohemianism that demands now and then a taste of wild
life. The English poet did not meet his Host or Miller
among his fellow ambassadors, and the Scotch bard must
often have left the company of Drs Blair and Eobertson
with an irresistible impulse to have his fling among the
Eattlin' Willies of the capital, whose example possibly led
him to form other connections of a kind to be regretted.
But it is hard to see how this could have been prevented by
any interposition of his high-class friends, or how, despite
Scott's reproach, they could, at this stage, have done anything
for the pecuniary relief of a man at once so wayward and so
proud. They did him substantial service in facilitating the
publication of his poems, and taking measures to ensure their
success. Lord Glencairn introduced him to the publisher
Creech, and got the members of the Caledonian Hunt to take
100 copies of the second edition. It appeared, 21st April
1787, had nearly 3000 subscribers, and ultimately brought
the author about £500 ; a sum which enabled him, besides
handing over a handsome amount, £200, to his brother, to
undertake several excursions, and, when the time came, to
stock a new farm. This volume, containing most of the
pieces in the Kilmarnock impression, with others, as the
" Winter Night " (the sole important product of December
1786), was several times reprinted during his life. In the
spring, Burns entered into an agreement to aid the engraver
Johnson in his "Museum," to the six volumes of which — the
last published shortly after his death — he gave about 180
songs. In September 1792 he was invited by Mr George
Thomson to supply material for a similar work, the "Melodies
of Scotland." On this undertaking also, he entered with
alacrity, only stipulating that he should not be required to
* Burns kept this volume under lock and key, and it was only printed,
with doubtful propriety, for limited circulation, after his death.
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 33
write in classic English, and contributed in all about 100
songs, wholly original, or so recast from older models as to
make them really new.
The leisure of the last nine years of the poet's life, i.e.,
from 1787 to 1796, was almost wholly devoted to these two
enterprises ; his other poetic performances being, with one
exception, insignificant. Nothing was said about money,
and his work was, in the one case entirely, in the other
nearly, gratuitous. On the publication of his first half
volume, Thomson, with a note of thanks, sent to Burns a
shawl for his wife, a picture by Allan representing the
" Cottar's Saturday Night," and £5. Such an acknowledge-
ment of a treasure " above rubies " has provoked inevitable
derision. It has been pleaded for Thomson that he had then
only received an instalment of a tenth part of the work, that
he was far from affluent, and that he put the whole of the
songs at the disposal of Dr Currie, when on the poet's death
that gentleman was about to edit an edition for the benefit
of his family. At all events, Burns indignantly stopped
any similar advance : he only forbears returning his corre-
spondent's " pecuniary parcel " because " it might savour of
affectation ; " if he hears a word more of such " debtor and
creditor traffic " he will " spurn the whole transaction ; " his
songs are " either below or above price." Whatever the
" motif " of this letter — a point which his inconsistency in
money matters, for he had not hesitated to dun Creech for
his due, and his frequent irony, leaves doubtful — he abode
by his determination never again to write for " cold unfeel-
ing ore." In 1795 when requested by the editor of a high-
class London newspaper to furnish weekly an article for the
" poetical department " at a remuneration of £5 2 a year, he
refused the offer. It is calculated that, including the profits
of the reissue of his poems in 1793, he had up to the date
of his death received for the literary labour of fifteen years
about £900 ; less than a third of the sum paid to Moore
for " Lallah Rooke," but a hundred times the outcome to
Milton of " Paradise Lost." Wisely, in any case, Burns
was never seduced by a popularity he feared to be
c
34 ROBERT BUKNS.
evanescent, to think of literature as a means of livelihood.
He adopted, by anticipation, the advice of Sir Walter
Scott — never more apposite than now — " let your pen be
your pastime, your profession your anchor," and, with the
idea of an independence at the plough-tail foremost in
his mind, was already negotiating with Mr Patrick Miller
of Dalswinton for a tenancy of a farm on the banks
of the Nith. With a view to explore the ground, he on
May 5 th started on the Border tour, with his friend Ainslie
of the Crochallans, of most of which we have in his journal
a sufficient record. From other sources we learn that, on Ins
return, he arrived at Mossgiel on the 8th of June. "0 Eobbie,"
his mother is said to have cried, as she met her son un-
announced at the farm-house door. Enough has been said —
sometimes rather rhapsodically — of an event so ready for rhe-
toric. The prodigal had gone into a far country and returned
with a laurel crown. In the old homestead all was sun-
shine, no one suspects maternal tenderness or scrutinises
fraternal praise; but the poet did not receive so graciously
the civilities of his "plebeian brethren," who, nine months
before, had taken the other side of the street, and were
ready to hound him into exile. The adulation of success
which follows on insolence to calamity is sure, on another
turn of the wheel, to be again reversed ; and Burns was all
through the blare and blaze manfully conscious that his
triumph was meteoric.
The old Armours were conspicuously deferential, and
got the return they deserved in his expression of disgust
at their " mean, servile compliance." With the daughter
it was different, and he flew, as Professor Wilson naively
expresses it, " too fervently to the arms of his Jean." After
hovering for a few days about Mauchline, he, driven by a
wandering impulse or lured by the haunts of his lost Mary,
rushed off on an expedition to the West Highlands, that has
been called mysterious, because we have no record of it, save
a few letters and an epigram composed at Inveraray, which
shows, as might have been expected, that he did not find
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 35
the atmosphere of the metropolis of the Argyles congenial.
After a month spent, on his return, in Ayrshire, we find
him, early in August, back in Edinburgh, where the fame
of his volume made him more a lion than ever in the
circles of his former friends, and opened to him others.
Unmoved by flattery or favour he, in one respect only,
betrayed a morbid self-consciousness. He was suspicious of
being stared at, intolerant of condescension, and too nervously
on his guard against the claims of learning or of rank. This
feeling appears in the " Winter Night " and passages of the
Common-place Book, in which he takes notes of the "charac-
ters and manners " as they rose around him. These pen and
ink sketches are, on the whole, conceived in a spirit of friendli-
ness, but they are also coloured by a cynical vein, and it is
hardly to be wondered at that when extracts — of course the
severest — began to be circulated people did not feel envious
of a place among them. There is little to add of the spring
and summer of this year save a few records of the poet's
impressionableness, generosity, and patriotic enthusiasm. In
January he writes to Hamilton that he has almost persuaded
a Lothian farmer's daughter to accompany him. In February
he applied for and obtained permission to erect the tomb-
stone over Fergusson. In March, answering Mrs Scott of
Wauchope, he wrote the famous Epistle, with the well-worn
lines beginning, " E'en then a wish, I mind its power," and
sent some grateful verses to Glencairn, which, as appears, he
did not obtain permission to publish. The memory of that
accomplished nobleman rests securely on the stanzas after-
wards inspired by the premature close (in 1791) of his
generous life, " The bridegroom may forget the bride," than
which there has been no finer tribute of genius to worth,
since Simonides and Pindar exalted the fame of the kings of
Syracuse. In April, in course of a Prologue for the benefit
of the veteran Scotch Roscius (Mr Wood), Burns, after refer-
ring to Hume, Eobertson, and Eeid, as glories of Caledonia,
perpetrated his worst criticism —
" Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan,"
36 KOBEKT BURNS.
and in May, writing to Mr Tytler of Woodhouselee on the
" Vindication of Mary Stuart," his worst lines —
" Though something like moisture conglobes in my eye,
Let no one misdeem me disloyal."
On the 25th he started with the schoolmaster Nicol,
another Crochallan, on a three months' tour in the Eastern
Highlands, in the course of which he visited Queen Mary's
birth-room at Linlithgow, the tomb of Sir John the Graeme
at Falkirk, the Carron Works, — which he compared to the
mouth of the Pit, — Bannockburn, scrawling on the window
of the inn at Stirling the dangerous stanza spread abroad to
his harm.
" The injured Stuart line is gone," &c,
Strathallan, suggesting the lament, " Thickest night around
me dwelling," Dunkeld, Birnam Hill, Aberfeldy, and the
ducal residence at Blair, where he met Mr Graham
of Fintry, and gave the toast, " Athole's honest men,
and Athole's bonnie lasses." They passed through Rothie-
murchus and Aviemore by Strathspey to Findhorn and
Castle Cawdor, then over Culloden to Forres and Shake-
speare's witch muir. We next find the poet entertained
at Castle Gordon, — an event commemorated in some of his
most graceful English verses, — and hurried away by the
jealous impatience of his companion, then returning by
Aberdeen (where he met some of his relatives and Bishop
Skinner, son of the author of " Tullochgorum," which he
extravagantly pronounced the best of Scotch songs) : we
trace him through Montrose to Perth and up the Almond
Water, looking for the scene of " Bessie Bell and Mary
Gray," and so by Kinross and Queensferry to Edinburgh.
Ere the month was out he made, with Dr Adair, a fourth
excursion, the main point of interest in which is his residence
at Harvieston, and intimacy with Miss Margaret Chalmers,
to whom he in vain offered his hand. On the same occasion
he made the acquaintance of Mr Ramsay of Ochtertyre
on the Teith, knelt on Brace's grave in the Cathedral of
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 3*i
Dunfermline, and then, " from grave to gay," having per-
suaded Adair to sit on the stool of repentance, administered
to him a parody of his own rebuke. At Clackmannan he
was knighted by an ancient lady with the sword of her
ancestor, the good King Bobert, and, nothing loath, responded
to her toast, " Hoolie uncos," i.e., " Awa' Whigs, awa'."
Burns refers to his Highland trip in particular as
" perfectly inspiring," but its only poetic outcome of much
consequence was " Macpherson's Lament," the death-song
of a freebooter (recalling that of Eegnar Lodbrog), on the
wild grandeur of which Mr Carlyle has eloquently dwelt.
The fact that these expeditions yielded so little direct
harvest may be explained in part by the business purpose of
the first, and the ill-adjusted companionship of the third ;
more by the prodigious productiveness of the two previous
years, and the social excitement of the six preceding months.
The soil on which rich crops grow must sometimes lie fallow.
Add that the spirit of poetry bloweth where it listeth, that
to a mind of emphatically spontaneous power the fact of
being expected to write was a bar to inspiration, that Burns,
unlike Scott, only took delight in fine scenery as a frame to
living interests, and we scarcely require to consider the
fatigues of travel in the days when a sturdy lexicographer's
journey to the Hebrides was a matter of more adventure
than is now that of a lady to the Eocky Mountains or the
Sandwich Isles.
Back in Edinburgh, the poet shifted to more comfort-
able quarters in St James' Square, where he lived with
Mr Cruikshank, whose sister is the Eosebud of his Muse.
The rest of the year was mainly devoted to negotiations
with Johnson, letters about the " Erebean fanatics," who
were persecuting Hamilton and M'Gill, and stray verses
addressed to Peggy Chalmers. On December 8, thrown
from a hackney coach, he sustained an injury serious enough
to lay him aside for six weeks, during which he expresses
despairing disgust of life, and describes himself as " the
sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac
imagination, agonising sensibility, and Bedlam passions."
38 ROBERT BURNS.
Poetic natures are rarely stoical, and a man accustomed to
walk the fields in the morning, to blaze in society at night,
naturally chafes under confinement with a disabled limb.
Burns was besides beginning to smart from the fickleness —
none the less that he had anticipated it — of " Fortune be-
guiling." His day of " grace, acceptance, and delight " had
passed its noon. The town had had its fill of the prodigy,
and the sough of the Reminiscences made the doors of the
great move more slowly on their hinges.
The proud poet in later days, when the castle grew
cold, sought solace in the " howff," now he frequented the
Crochallans, or wandered about the crags. He had been
foiled in one love-suit, and was prosecuting another under
difficulties. Our space will only permit us to sum the
evidence bearing on this strange story. On December
7th, Burns, at the table of a common friend, met Mrs
M'Lehose, a lady whose husband had gone to the West
Indies and left her with limited means to bring up two
children in retirement in Potterow. Handsome, lively,
well read, of easy manners and a ready wit, a writer of verses,
sentimental and yet ardent, she was born in the same year
as Burns, and told him that she shared his dispositions, and
would have been his twin-brother had she been a man.
Two such beings were obviously made for one another, and
they lost no time in finding it out. The above-mentioned
accident having prevented their taking tea together, on the
following clay he received her condolences with rapture. If
he was, as lawyers maintain, at this time a married man, he did
not know it ; but she was aware that she was only a grass-widow,
and she was virtuous. Their correspondence must therefore
be conducted with discretion, and " friendship," not " love,"
must be their watchword. How to reconcile the pretence
with the reality was the trouble. Let them take the names
of Clarinda and Sylvander, and exchange their compliments
with the pastoral innocence of shepherd and shepherdess
in the Golden Age. So it went on, letters flying to and fro,
like carrier pigeons, then greetings from windows, visits,
risks, recoilings, fresh assignations, reproaches and reconcili-
A SUMMARY OF HIS CABEEB AND GENIUS. 39
ations, wearisome to us, alternately tantalising and alluring
to the mutually fascinated pair. It is perhaps impossible
to get at the absolute truth in this business, and if conjec-
ture errs, it ought to be on the side of charity. One point
has been now made plain, it was no case of mere philander-
ing. Beneath all Clarinda's verbiage there throbs the pulse
of a real passion, afraid of itself, and yet incapable of sur-
rendering its object. She knew that she was playing with
edge-tools, but she had confidence in the strength of her
principles to draw the line. Sylvander writes more like an
artist, never with so much apparent affectation as in many
of those letters — fustian and bombast they often are, but as
to their being falsetto is another matter. On all that Burns
wrote there is some stamp of the same strong mind ; but he
was capable of moulding his style on that of his correspond-
ents, and adapting his sentiments to theirs to such a degree
as often to contradict himself. When we compare his
letter of the 2nd March to Mrs M'Lehose with that of the
3rd to Ainslie, we are tempted to apply to the former his
own line, " Tis a' finesse in Bob Mossgiel." But this plastic
faculty, the actor's power, the weakness of over sympathetic
or electric natures, is wrongly confounded with deliberate
deceit ; it is an invariable accompaniment of dramatic
genius, which takes its colour from what it works in, " like
the dyer's hand." The poet's religious moods were as
genuine as those in which he led the chorus of Crochallan :
the former were elicited by contact with religious people ;
but he never even to them pretends to be orthodox ; he is
constantly fighting with Clarinda's Calvinism, and trying to
undermine her confessor, Kemp. It therefore by no means
follows that, in his offer to meet her " at the Throne of
Grace," he was playing the hypocrite : if he did so, it was
the worst thing he ever did.
Howbeit, this love-making was his main occupation, till,
in February, he had news from Mauchline which naturally
distressed and seems less naturally to have surprised him.
Jean was again about to become a mother, and this time her
father had turned her out of the house. Burns, of course,
40 ROBERT BURNS.
rushed to the rescue, established her in the neighbourhood
9 O
with the comforts essential to her condition, and succeeded in
reconciling her to her mother ; but he was at first incapable
of shaking off the spell of the syren, and wrote to Clarinda
the somewhat heartless letter about the "farthing candle"
and "the meridian sun," — the former being the woman who
was little more than a month later to become his wife, and
to be through good and ill report the faithful and forbearing
helpmate of the remaining eight years of his life. On
February 25th he went to Dumfriesshire and took the farm
of Ellisland. "A poet's choice," said Allan Cunningham's
father, "Foregirth had better soil;" and perhaps the views
of the Nith had something to do with it. The lease was
signed March 1 3th, the day on which Jean's second pair of twins
are supposed to have made their appearance. They, however,
only survived a few weeks. On the 17th Burns returned
to Edinburgh, and on the 22nd had a farewell meeting with
his " divine poetess." This, says one narrator, " was the last
of the serio-comic episode of Clarinda." It is hardly so ;
the episode, more serious than comic, had an epilogue ; the
correspondence continued intermittently, and the renewal of
their intimacy, after more than three years of domestic life,
resulted in at least one immortal verse.
The poet left Edinburgh on the 24th, having arranged
with his publisher, and sent, as we have seen, a share of his
profits to Gilbert. He had also applied to Mr Graham for
a place in the Excise, the duties of which he hoped to com-
bine with those of a farmer in the same district. His name
being placed on the list, he was afterwards appointed to a
post of £50 (raised in course of time to £70) a year, which
he congratulates himself on having obtained without any
hanging on or mortifying solicitation. On the 26th he was in
Glasgow, on the 30th riding over the moors between Gallo-
way and Ayrshire. It has been conjectured that he may then
have come to the resolve to throw over his poetical grass-
widow and do his duty by the comparatively illiterate girl
who for him had given up everything. A letter to Miss
Chalmers, April 6th, is however our first distinct intimation of
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS- 41
this resolve. On the 28th he admits to his old friend James
Smith that he has made another irregular marriage. It
was afterwards (May 2nd) solemnised in the house of Gavin
Hamilton, as a Justice of the Peace, and on August 2nd
solemnly confirmed at the annual communion in Mauchline,
when both parties were reprimanded, expressed regret for
their conduct, and "Mr Burns," by way of fine, "gave a
guinea for the poor." Jean did not sign her name, so her
husband did it for her ; but only six weeks later he
" acknowledges her letter," so the non-signature must have
been due to nervousness. In frequent references to the
event (especially that about the Synod in his heart) the
poet takes too much credit for his conduct, but he always
adds that he expects to have no reason to regret it. " I can
fancy how, but I have never seen where, I could have made
it better," is his rather ungracious refrain. In a note to
Miss Chalmers on the 16th, he says that his wife had read
nothing but the Bible and his verses (in singing which he
often praises her voice), but that his marriage had taken
him "out of villainy." Clarinda, however, was of an opposite
opinion, and on the news wrote a furious letter, calling
Burns " a villain ;" an accusation to which, in a dignified
reply of March 1789, he refuses to plead guilty, being
" convinced of innocence, though conscious of folly."
There appears, we must confess, more of the latter than the
former in the whole extraordinary story, the sum of which
is that the poet had entangled himself with two women, and
married the one he loved least, but to whom he was far the
more deeply bound.
VI. — Sixth Period, Ellisland, July 1788 — October 1791.
{JSt 30-33.)
Burns left Edinburgh emphatically for good. His first
winter had been, like Byron's one brilliant London year,
over roses all the way; in the second he had to walk on
withered leaves. His old temptations had led him into
trouble, even threatened to harden his heart, and some of
his great friends were doing their best to corrupt his taste.
42 ROBERT BURNS.
The criticism of the eighteenth century is by no means so
contemptible as it is the fashion to represent it ; the English
of Eobertson, even the Latinised style of Blair, was better
than the simpleton Anglo-Saxonism of recent antiquarians ;
but it was not the manner of writing proper to Burns, and
their square and rule were ill-adapted for the measurement
of his wood-notes. When a man adopts a style unnatural
to him, he adopts its most exaggerated or degenerate
forms; when the author of the "Jolly Beggars" tried to
mimic the verse of Pope, the result was a reproduction of
Hayley. When he expressed to Clarinda his belief that
" the soul is capable of inflammation," he reminds us not of
Steele but of the Della-Cruscans ; he deserves a place in
the " Loves of the Triangles," when he " conglobes a tear."
His metaphors are often laboured ; his allegories of "wisdom
dwelling with prudence," etc., are lame travesties of the
"Vision of Mirza." The dedications, acknowledgements, and
other letters of the period have the same taint. In writing
to Lords Buchan and Eglinton he is not at his ease, as he
would have been in conversation with them. It seems unneces-
sary to inform the one that he is incapable of mercenary
servility, and when he gratefully remembers the honour of a
suggestion from the other, which he inly ridiculed, we feel
how near affectation may approach to insincerity. Burns only
escaped the latter vice by timely rescue from an atmosphere
that was becoming unwholesome, and which no high and most
probably unsuitable alliance could have made otherwise.
Burns had all the " honest pride" of which he says too
much, and would stoop for neither smile nor favour, but to
humour the great people at their dances he wore a thin
mask, and painfully went through a minuet with hob-nailed
shoes. How bad the spoken criticism of his censors must
sometimes have been, we may judge by some of the speci-
mens which have been printed, e.g. : — Dr Gregory's rejection
of "The Lass of Ballochmyle," and his "swashing blows,"
beating the last bit of life out of the poet's untimely wounded
hare ; Dr Moore's recommendation to avoid the use of the
Scotch dialect ; Dr Blair's refusal to allow " Tarn o' Shanter"
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AXD GENIUS. 43
to be printed for the benefit of his family as an appendix to
the remains of Michael Bruce; and George Thomson's sugges-
tion that "Welcome to your gory bed" be softened into
"Welcome to your honour's bed," are among the most
ludicrous in literature. True genius seldom wants advice;
but the habit of offering it is with some as inveterate as
that of gambling or drink. Fortunately Burns seldom
paid much heed to the cavils of men who "spun their thread
so fine that it was neither fit for warp nor woof," and though,
from good-nature, he sometimes permitted his verses to be
spoiled, on afterthought a better judgment generally restored
them. In his fragment of a Scotch Dunciad, "The Poet's
Progress," he calls critics "those cut-throat bandits on the
paths of fame," and his reception of Alison's "Essay on
Taste," proves that on occasion he could turn and bite the
biters. On perusing this politely dressed model of conclusive
irony, Stewart innocently remarks on the mastery of the
laws of association shown by the poet.
The lease of Ellisland ran from Whitsunday, but Burns
did not take possession till the middle of June. His time
till the end of autumn was occupied in getting ready the
farm, and rushing backward and forward over a distance
of forty-five miles, between Dumfriesshire and Mauchline
where his wife continued to reside. Present or absent, his
dominant feeling during this honeymoon, lengthened by
interruption, was that which inspires one of his most de-
servedly popular songs, "Of a' the airts the wind can blaw."
When alone he was a prey to many moods, for solitude
never suited him, and his first impressions of the Nithsdale
folk were unfavourable. " Nothing flourishes among them,"
he exclaims, "but stupidity and canting; they have as much
idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet," and " their whisky is
rascally." Ere the month was over he had, however, opened
up friendly relations, only interrupted near the close of his
life, with the Eiddells of Glenriddell, and had written the
well-known verses in Friars' Carse Hermitage, conceived in
a spirit of Horatian content. About the same time he was
giving an appreciative study to Spenser, and to Dryden's
44 ROBERT BURNS.
Georgics of Virgil, criticising amateur verses with which he
now began to be pestered, writing a remonstrance to the
London Star against the anti-Jacobite demonstrations at the
centenary of the " Glorious Revolution," and sending to
Blacklock his ideas of a model wife, whose " head is imma-
terial in comparison with her heart."
In the first week of December he brought Mrs Burns to
" the Isle," a steading a mile down the Nith, where they re-
mained for about seven months, till everything was ready to
enable them to move up to Ellisland. Now, if ever, were
the poet's halcyon days. He had to all appearance found a
quiet haven, a good landlord, a promising farm, and a loving
helpmate. He could look forward to rearing his own crops,
walking over the fields, or loitering by the river banks, en-
joying his own thoughts and setting his new words to old
tunes. Master of his surroundings, he hoped at last to be
master of himself : his elastic temper let him put by the
shadows of the past, and he brought into mid-winter the
spirit of the spring. His songs of this period are marked
by a more genuine buoyancy than either before or after.
Beginning with the defiant little lilt, " I hae a wife o' my
am," he quickly followed it by two of his most famous
lyrics, " Auld Lang Syne," in which he turned a tame
original into the national song of peaceful, as " Scots wha
hae " is of warlike, Scotland ; and " The Silver Tassie," be-
ginning, " Go fetch to me a pint of wine," a drinking song
with the aroma of Lovelace or Herrick. Burns had set be-
fore himself a model domestic life, and for a time maintained
it. He helped Mr Eiddell to establish a public library,
had family worship after his fashion, and went to church
for example, though he found Mr Kilpatrick rather
" drouthy." Respected by his servants, esteemed by his
neighbours, beloved at home, his ambition was to act up to
his verse, and " make a happy fireside clime for weans and
wife."
The new year 1789 opened brightly : on the first day he
wrote to Mrs Dunlop one of his longest and finest letters.
Soon afterwards an angry gust has recorded itself in the
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 45
outbreak of ferocity, " Dweller in yon dungeon dark," pro-
voked by his being turned out of a roadside inn, on a bitter
night, to make way for the pompous funeral cortege of Mrs
Oswald. Burns was a dangerous person to offend, and the
quarrelsome lads of the district did well to hold their peace
when he threatened to " hang them up in sang like potato-
bogles." He was a good disciplinarian, and, while generally
indulgent to his servants, came down heavily on dense
stupidity or obvious neglect. About Midsummer his delight
in chastising wrong-doers found vent in smiting the Philistines
with " The Kirk's Alarm," a ringing blast about which he
seems to have taken some trouble, one among numerous
comments on his theory of literary work. " I have no
great faith in the boastful pretensions to intuitive propriety
and unlaboured elegance. The rough material of fine
writing is certainly the gift of genius ; but I as firmly be-
lieve that the workmanship is the united effort of pains,
attention, and repeated trial." It would have been well
had this passage been impressed on the minds of his imita-
tors, of whom the first of too many crops had begun to
appear. " My success," he complains, " has encouraged such
a swarm of ill-spawned monsters to crawl into public note
under the title of Scotch poets that the very term Scotch
poetry borders on the burlesque." During the whole of
this period Burns was actively engaged on the farm, taking
his full share of hard work, and maintaining perfect sobriety ;
but he found leisure to write several songs, among them,
" John Anderson my Jo," and a number of letters from
which an anthologia of his wit, wisdom, and tenderness
might be constructed. The series addressed to his brother
William would be amusing were it not for its closing in
about a year with a record of the poor lad's death among
strangers. " Form good habits," and above all " learn taci-
turnity," is the refrain of advice which this comparatively com-
monplace member of the family must have found it as easy
as his monitor found it impossible to follow. Towards the
close of July the Excise appointment was conferred, and
shortly after the family left the Isle for Ellisland, where
46 ROBERT BURNS.
(August 18) Francis Wallace, the second son, made liis
appearance, and about the same time Eobert, the eldest,
now three years old, was brought from Mauchline. The
few notable incidents of the succeeding months are familiar
in connection with the verses to which they gave rise. A
September meeting with Nicol and Masterton at Moffat was
the inspiration of " Willie brewed a peck o' maut ; " the
" mighty claret shed " at Friars' Carse, in October, of the
famous "Whistle." Mr Douglas seems to have made out
that Burns on that occasion was present only in spirit, not
in body ; but the fact that the verses must have been
written five days after " Thou lingering Star " has not
failed to evoke comment on the rapidly shifting moods of
the Borealis race, of which he was a consummate type.
Bound the dawn of 1790 clouds began to thicken. Ellis-
land was after all proving as profitless in the poet's hands
as Lochlea or Mossgiel. Whether it was owing to want of
skill — want of energy it was not — or a luckless choice of
soil and situation, he was, as a farmer, destined to one chagrin
after another, and had to fall back on his " second line of
defence," the Excise, a defence unfortunately exposed to
the attacks of enemies from within. There was undoubtedly
some irony in his choice of a profession, of which no one
was so sensible as himself. He refers to it fitfully in mock-
ing verse and serious prose, now fearing the " Parnassian
queans " will disdain him, now manfully asserting, " I
would rather have it said that my profession borrowed credit
from me than I from my profession ; " again complaining
that the extent of his ten parishes, compelling him to ride
some 200 miles a week, is a strain on his strength. Docu-
mentary evidence, especially that recently made public,
demonstrates that, during the seven years of his service, he dis-
charged his duty to the Crown admirably well, and under
trying circumstances with the utmost possible consideration
and humanity. The stale text " suaviter in modo, fortiter
in re " was never more apt. In dealing with poor old
women and other retailers on a small scale of " home-
brewed " he strained the law in their favour, and sometimes
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 47
gave them timely warning. On the other hand, he was so
severe on hardened offenders that in one year his decreet
perquisites reached the maximum known in the district.
The evil of his new business was that it led him to spend
so much of his time from home, and to mix so much in
questionable society. Towards Midsummer he was prone to
linger in Dumfries at the Globe Tavern, where a " guid
willie waught" was not the sole attraction. The land-
lady's niece, a certain Annie Park, was, we are told, thought
beautiful by the guests when they were in a state that made
them tolerant in matters of taste. With this Annie of " the
gowden locks," the poet contracted an intimacy that inspired
what he himself regarded as the best love song he ever com-
posed, " Yestreen I had a pint of wine," and resulted in the
birth (March 31, 1791) of his second Elizabeth. The
mother, being no more heard of, is supposed to have died.
The child was first sent to Mossgiel, and then brought to
Ellisland, to be nursed by the much enduring Jean along
with her third son, William Nicol, born just ten days later.
Burns had again broken loose : " the native hue of his re-
solution " was blurred over by the red fires of passion, when
in a defiant mood he threw off the stanzas beginning, " I
murder hate," and ending with a notable proof of his Biblical
knowledge. In other directions he was wasting his genius
on election ballads, on prologues and addresses for the local
theatre, and on furious prose execrations against the Puritans,
the Edinburgh police, and things in general. But his genuine
inspiration — though he complains of the Muse's visits being
" short and far between " — had not deserted him. July gave
birth to the elegy and epitaph, among the finest in the lan-
guage, on Mathew Henderson. In September Captain Grose,
an antiquarian Falstaff to whom he had been introduced at
Friars' Carse, (the subject of one of the poet's most good
humoured epigrams, and of the lines, " Hear Land o' Cakes
and Brither Scots "), having got from him three traditionary
stories of Alloway Kirk, recommended Burns to put them
into verse. The result was " Tarn o' Shanter " thrown off
in one day's walk along the Nith, in an ecstacy, as Mrs
48 KOBEliT BURNS.
Burns narrates ; but matured into its published form dining
the three succeeding months. Of this period there are
extant several records of friends or strangers who came
to visit him ; among them the pleasant pastoral of Kamsay
of Ochtertyre with the quotation, " uxor Sabina qualis,"
and that of two English gentlemen who found him
angling with a fox skin cap on his head, and a broadsword
hanging from his belt.* The next year is marked by
little of note, save three instances of the poet's generous
sympathy : — his interest in the publication of Bruce's poems,
his Ode for the coronation of James Thomson's monument
at Ednam, and his interposition in favour of the school-
master, Clarke, threatened with dismissal for severity to
his boobies — an interference which seems ultimately to
have been successful. During the summer Burns had
four disabling falls from his horse ; but he produced the
elegy on Miss Burnet, the lament for Glencairn, the Banks
of Doon, " Bonnie wee thing " in honour of Miss Davies,
and began to celebrate, under the name of Chloris, a Miss
Jean Lorimer, who from this date till the close of 1795
was his reigning beauty. He wrote besides several letters
and some Jacobite songs, the chief of which, " Farewell
thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye skies," was a
favourite of the poet Campbell. Currie says it is " a hymn
worthy of the palmy days of the Grecian muse." At mid-
summer, Burns had determined to leave his farm, and, the
roup of the stock having been effected in September, the
family flitted to the headquarters of the rest of Ins life,
Dumfries.
VII. — Period, Dumfries, 1791 — 1796. ;Et. 33-37.
a. The Wee Vennel {Bank Street), Oct. 1791— May 1793.
b. The Mill Vennel {Burns Street), May 1793— May 1796.
Poets have thriven among the hills, nowhere else could
Wordsworth, or amid the turmoil of a city, nowhere else
* Mr Carlyle does not credit this story, but it is fairly well authenti-
cated.
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAEEEB AND GENIUS. 40
could Pope have found his inspiration; the atmosphere of a
county town is fatal to them. Dumfries, at the close of last
century, was by all accounts a bad type of its class : the
majority of its industrious inhabitants found relief from the
drudgery of their trades in the small gossip of their limited
society; the loungers went " black-guardin " through the
streets, or rioting in taverns. In this headquarter of scandal
and dissipation Burns' course was almost inevitably down-
wards. His whole history was a struggle between the
loftiest aspirations, the most refined humanities, and tempta-
tions which his will was seldom strong enough to resist.
During his last five years, his official duties compelled him
constantly to ride in all weathers over moor and vale in
search of illicit distilleries, and come into close contact with
their contents. His genius opened to him the doors of
castle and of cot ; in the latter he was exposed to rural
hospitality, in the former to the demands of the company
gathered to wonder at his wit and rejoice to find it flow freer
with the wine. " They would not thank me," he said of the
squires and lairds, " if I did not drink with them. I have
to give them a slice of my constitution." Thousands of
professing Christians, leading far worse lives, have found
shelter in obscurity ; but when a great man yields it is pro-
claimed on the house-tops and cried in the market.
The early records of Ms residence are full of forebodings.
His income was inadequate for his growing family, and he
began to have reason to complain of the coldness of patrons.
" The rock of independence," of which he was wont to talk,
was overhung with clouds lit by the meteors of French
Revolutionism. In Nov. 1791 he bitterly writes to Ainslie,
" My wife scolds me, my business torments me, and my sins
come staring me in the face." It is at this period that Clarinda
auain flashes with a vivid lustre across the scene. Their inter-
mittent correspondence thickened, and, towards the close of
November, he went to Edinburgh and spent a week mainly
in her company. To their farewell meeting, on the 6 th
December, there are several fervent allusions. From Dumfries,
on his return, we have on the 15th: "This is the sixth letter
D
50 KOBEKT BUHNS.
that I have written since I left you, my ever beloved."
Shortly after he sends the verses, " Ae fond kiss and then
we sever," with the quatrain,
" Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken hearted,"
which, quoted by Byron, admired by Carlyle and Mr Arnold,
is the quintessence of passionate regret. More than a year
elapsed during which Mrs M'Lehose had gone to the Indies,
and, finding her husband surrounded by a troop of small mulat-
toes, had come back again. Then more letters passed, the
final one preserved being from the poet, dated Castle Douglas,
25th June 1794, in which he professes to be perplexed as
to the manner in which he is to address her ; " the language
of friendship will not suffice," &c. Then he reflects on the
fickleness of fame ; " she does not blow her trump now as
she did." "Yet," he adds, "I am as proud as ever, and wish
in my grave to be stretched to my full length, that I may
occupy every inch of ground I have a right to." Here — not
in the rendezvous of March 1788 — closes the episode of
Clarinda, unless we bring together two later references that
originally lay far apart. One is from a letter of the poet to
Mary Peacock, the friend in whose house the lovers first met,
of date 6th December 1792. "This eventful day recalls to
my memory such a scene. Heaven and earth, when I
remember a far distant person." Then he gives the song
" Ance mair I hail thee thou gloomy December,"
" Parting wi' Nancy, Oh, ne'er to meet mair."
The other is found in a leaf of an old woman's diary of 1831
on the same anniversary, " This day I can never forget.
Parted with Burns in the year 1791 (forty years ago) never
more to meet in this world. 0, may we meet in heaven ! "
Ms/gov jj xa.ru ddxgva. The writer survived till 1841, reaching
the age of 82.
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 51
In Burns' miscellaneous correspondence of this period
there is little of conspicuous interest. The early stage of his
intimacy with Maria (wife of Walter Eiddell of Woodley
Park), a brilliant West Indian of nineteen, at whose house he
was for two years a frequent guest, is marked by an intro-
duction of her book to Ins Edinburgh printer. In September
1792, acknowledging to Alexander Cunningham a diploma
conferred by the royal archers, he writes one of his half
dozen most remarkable letters, brimming with banter like
Falstaffs, then growing savage as Timon, in an attack on the
" religious nonsense," which he declares to be " of all the
most nonsensical," asking, " why has a religious turn of mind
always a tendency to narrow and illiberalise the heart," and
then putting the whole storm to rest by the exquisite verse
inspired by Miss Lyndsay Baillie,
" The very deil he couldna' scathe
Whatever wad belang thee ;
He'd look into thy bonie face
And say, ' I canna wrang thee
) )3
In the same month the Thomson correspondence begins,
one of the poet's earliest contributions to their joint under-
taking being "Ye banks and braes and streams around."
The first volume was published in July 1793, and shortly
afterwards came the refusal of remuneration. In March we
have an interesting literary link in a letter to Miss Benson
of York, afterwards Mrs Basil Montague, Carlyle's ill-requited
patroness, and a request to the bailies of Dumfries to be
made a freeman of the town, the granting of which enabled
his sons to be well educated in the grammar school at small
expense. In April 1793 an exuberant humour overflows in
his last letter to his old friend Ainslie, signed Spunkie, with
a notable satire on pedants, who are advised to go about
with bundles of books bound to their backs. Towards the
close of the year he writes, to Mrs Dunlop, of Cowper's 'Task'
"a glorious poem, bating a few scraps of Calvinistic divinity,
it has the religion which ennobles man."
The subject of Burns's Religion might lead us into
52 ROBERT BURNS.
deeps beyond the range of the Satires, and supply material
for a distinct chapter. His views, seldom clearly formu-
lated, are not always consistent ; within limits they vary
with varying moods : but they are in the main those of an
anxious sceptic, as opposed to either extreme of positive or
negative dogmatism. His prevailing reverence in treating
sacred subjects has been justly admired : but, while his light
words have been gathered up against him, the extent to
which he deliberately departed from the " Orthodoxy " of
the mass of his countrymen has been studiously slurred
over. Burns knew his Bible well, and made frequent use of
it; but we have no reason to believe that, after manhood, he
ever read it otherwise than, as a great modern critic has told
us to read it, " like any other book." " This letter," cries his
most recent biographer, "seems to savour of Socinianism."
The word, often used in Scotland to conjure up the devil of
intolerance, is equally applicable to almost all the leading-
writers of the eighteenth century ; the only conspicuous
exceptions being Cowper and Johnson. Burns was, as far
as he had realised to himself his own position, a Deist, and
held that the mission of Christ was to redeem man from
himself, rather than from any " wrath to come." " School-
divinity," he in mockery exclaims, " raves abroad on all the
winds." . . " On earth discord ! a gloomy heaven above, open-
ing her jealous gates to the nineteen thousandth part of the
tithe of mankind ! and below an inescapable and inexorable
hell, expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of
mortals. doctrine, comfortable and healing to the weary
wounded soul of man." On points yet more radical he gives
an uncertain sound. E.g. "We know nothing, or next to
nothing, of the substance and structure of our souls. . . Are
we a piece of machinery, or do those workings argue some-
thing within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself
partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities,
a God that's made all tilings, man's immaterial and im-
mortal nature." ..." Can it be possible that when I resign
this feverish being I shall still find myself in conscious
existence ? ... If there is another life, 'tis only for the good.
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREEB AND GENIUS. '>'■'>
Would to God I as firmly believed it, as I ardently wish it."
. . . "All my fears and cares are of this world ; if there is
another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it. Every
fair, unprejudiced enquirer must in such degree be a sceptic.
As for immortality, we want data to go upon. One thing
frightens me much, that we are to live forever seems too
good news to be true." "If there be a life beyond the
grave, which I trust there is, and if there be a good God pre-
siding over nature, which I am sure there is, thou (Fergusson)
art now enjoying existence in a glorious world."
" ' Tell us ye dead,
Will none of you in pity disclose the secret
What 'tis you are and we must shortly be.'
A thousand times I have made this apostrophe to the de-
parted sons of men, but not one of them has ever thought
fit to answer the question. that some courteous ghost
would blab it out. It cannot be. You and I, my friend,
must make the experiment by ourselves, and for ourselves."
Stretching out his arms to these vast voids, crying aloud
in the wilderness, beating at the bars of the iron gates,
Burns had no care to pose as a protagonist about a disputed
text, or to ride the whirlwind of a tea-cup storm over an
antiquated ceremonial. His clear, strong mind — none
clearer or stronger of his age or nation — tore right through
those comparatively trivial counterscarps of discussion, and
battered about the citadel; raising the questions of the exist-
ence of a beneficent, omnipotent Being, and the hopes of a
future life. On the last he is tossed, like a ship at sea : on
the first he seems to find an anchor. His ethical standard
is, in prose and verse alike, explicit. " Whatever mitigates
the woes or increases the happiness of others, this is my
criterion of goodness, and whatever injures society at large,
or any individual in it" (in which category he is careful to
include the whole animal creation), " this is my measure of
iniquity." Again, " Of all the qualities we assign to the
author and director of Nature, by far the most enviable is
to be able to wipe away all tears from all eyes. What
54 ROBERT BURNS.
sordid wretches are they who go to their magnificent mauso-
leums with hardly the consciousness of having made one
poor honest heart happy." Burns's Creed is that of Pope's
" Universal Prayer ; " his Religion is condensed in the
couplet —
" The heart benevolent and kind
The most resembles God."
His Millennium was no miraculous cataclysm, no late fulfil-
ment of the wonderful old dream of deliverance from Nero,
but the realisation of the slowly dawning golden age —
" When man to man the warld o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that."
The poet's literary activity during these years was, with the
exception of a few prologues and epigrams, restricted to his
songs, which he continued to pour forth as from a well of living
waters. He had planned a long poem on a legend of the Bruce,
but never found himself in a vein or at leisure to accomplish
it; fortunately so, had it led him to blank verse, in which he
always failed. To the years 1792, 1793, belong, among
others, the lyrics, "The Deil's awa' wi' the Exciseman," "0 saw
ye bonnie Leslie," " Gala Water," " Poortith Cauld," " Lord
Gregory," and " Scots wha hae," the last inspired in the course
of an excursion to Galloway with Mr Syme — a friendly stamp
collector, who occupied the ground floor of the house in Bank
Street. The following year gave birth to " The Minstrel of
Lincluden " expanded into " The Vision," beginning, " As I
stood by yon roofless tower " (for there are two poems of the
same name), " My Love is like a red, red Rose," " It was
a' for our rightful King,"*" which, if it be Burns', is his
noblest contribution to Jacobite minstrelsy, and about the
same date — passing from pole to pole of politics — the Ode on
Washington's birthday. In the interval, the family, increased
(November 21st, 1792) by the addition of a daughter (who
died in the autumn of 1795), had removed to their second
* This poem, with the exception of one verse in the ballad of Molly
Stewart, never seems to have been heard of before its appearance in
.Johnson's Museum.
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 55
and larger Dumfries residence, a self-contained house in the
Mill Vennel, in which were born the fourth son, James
Glencairn (1794), and the fifth, Maxwell, who came into the
world on the day and at the hour of his father's funeral
Meanwhile during these years the poet had twice got into
trouble, owing to an amiable indiscretion in the first in-
stance ; in the second to a misdemeanour.
Burns' politics are on the surface somewhat puzzling. He
was a Jacobite and a Jacobin, not in succession but simultane-
ously, and attempts have been made to reconcile the apparent
contradiction by asserting that he was not much in earnest
on either side. This view, based on a note to one of his songs,
" except when my passions were heated . . . my Jacobitism
was merely by way of vive la bagatelle" is adopted by
Scott ; and Alexander Smith denies the genuineness of both
political sentiments, saying the one sprung from his imagina-
tion, the other from his discontent. The poet's own apolo-
getic expression, however, loses its force when we remember
that most of his best work was due to passion; and his com-
mentators forget that Burns could only write well on matters
on which his heart was set. He had only contempt for the
squabbles and corruptions of a county election where
" lobster-coated-puppies " were ranged against well-to-do-
tradesmen, with their ragged regiments hooting at each other
across the street : hence his ballads, &c, on all local and
practical affairs might well be dispensed with. His arrows
only stuck when they came from a bow at full tension ; his
bullets only hit the mark when, as in the German fable,
they had been dipped in the huntsman's blood. No doubt
modern Jacobitism, like devotion to anything that is past,
must draw largely on the feelings, and the spirit of
Jacobinism is whetted by a sense of injustice. But Burns
has written too much and too well of both to permit his re-
gard for either to be set down to a love of " fine phrases."
Verses like these —
" Great Dundee who smiling victory led,
And fell a martyr in her arms."
50 KOBERT BURNS.
" Bold Scrimgeour fellows, gallant Graham,
Auld Covenanters shiver ;
Forgive ! forgive ! much wronged Montrose
Now death and hell engulf thy foes ; "
those with the refrain, " There'll never be peace till Jamie
comes hame," and (if it was his), " Now a' is done that
man can do," are no more the outcome of shallow senti-
ment than " Let us pray that come it may," is of personal
pique. " Politics are not Poetry," said Goethe, and wrapped
in his own classic art, and the problems of all time, wrote at
his Meister and Xenien with the echoes of Jena about his
ears. But Goethe was a man apart ; his maxim expresses
only a half truth ; it may suffice for calm philosophers, or the
gilt gingerbread of sickly sentimentalism, but poets who are
men of like though fiercer passions than their race, the class
whose souls are " fiery particles," will be fervid politicians,
but of a peculiar, and as regards their immediate surround-
ings, perhaps a useless kind. It is of the essence of poetry
to attach itself to commanding Personalities, to Eomance and
to Ideals. The practical government of compromising parties
has not elicited a single verse worth reading. The poet
looks over the heads of Whig and Tory to legends of the
setting, or promises of the rising sun, he celebrates Arthur
and Barbarossa, or he heralds the millennium of Shelley, or he
falls, as Byron did before he enrolled among the Carbonari,
at the feet of a Napoleon. By dint of a sham audacity, even
the sanguinary charlatan who travestied the last, has enlisted
the homage of our greatest poetess. Over the house of Bruns-
wick it has never been found possible to be poetically
enthusiastic. The very countenances of the Georges were
enough to gorgonise the Muses. In all the arts they
deliberately patronised mediocrity and neglected genius. The
great minister of the first and second, Sir Eobert Walpole,
" the poet's foe," grew dunces faster than Pope could slay
them. The great minister of the third, the elder Pitt, was,
during the noblest part of his career, practically at war with
his sovereign, — the obstinate farmer whose policy had lost to
us one continent and embroiled us with another. The King
A SUMMABY OF HIS CABEEB AND GENIUS. 57
was a more hopeless theme for song than his son, the fribble,
in training to become " the first gentleman in Europe." The
poet's letters, whether of defiance or apology, public or
private, to the Star newspaper or to Mrs Dunlop, are full of
hardly-suppressed disgust at the self-complacent " reign of
Heavenly Hanoverianism." No wonder his fancy reverted
to the Stuarts, whose names from that of their glory, the first
James, — the great King and good poet whose assassination
retarded for a hundred years the civilisation of his country, —
to that of their shame, the sixth, had been indissolubly linked
with minstrelsy and chivalrous adventure. The ill-starred
enterprizes of the exiled race, appealing at once to the
poetic sympathy with fallen greatness and the poetic
love of tradition, gave birth to the host of stirring or
pathetic ballads on which Burns fed. He grants that the
issue tried at Culloden was decided well, but it does not
hinder him from weeping with the Highland widow over her
slain sons ; he theoretically admits that " Sacred Freedom's
cause " was that of the Covenanters, but he passes over the
martyrs of Episcopacy to celebrate "our greatly injured
lovely Scottish Queen," and echo the charge of the Graeme
at Killiecrankie.
The same temperament which led him to dwell on com-
manding Personalities and Eomance in the past, also led him
to look with favour on the imposing figures and aspirations
that seemed, in the present, to hold out hopes for the future.
Various estimates have been made as to the extent to which
the revolution in English verse that marked the close of the
century was affected by French politics ; but there is no
doubt they had points of contact and affinity ; nor was it
possible that Burns should have remained callous to a move-
ment to which in his "green unknowing youth," even
Wordsworth designed to offer his aid. He settled in
Dumfries about the date of Mirabeau's death ; when the
most moderate liberals still looked with favour on the
uprising of a people against centuries of misrule. Somewhat
later Jemappes was still regarded as a triumph of defensive
warfare, and twelve months more elapsed before Dan ton had
58 ROBERT BURNS.
flung down the head of a king as his gage, and Burke had
taken it up in his paroxysms against the regicides. It is
hard for us after ninety years of disenchanting history to
realize the fascination of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,"
before the reign of terror had shown the dangers of the first,
and experience the unreality of the second. Burns was not
slow to manifest and even to parade Ms sympathies.
Towards the close of February 1792, we are told that he
seized a smuggling craft, bought four of her guns * and sent
them as a present to the National Assembly, and that, on
their being intercepted, the incident, with others, as his
proposing the health of George Washington, at a banquet,
went against him. In any case, rumours got abroad that he
not only held but had freely expressed revolutionary opinions.
The Government of the day was nervous and alert, remember-
ing Wilkes, alarmed by Paine and the "Friends of the People,"
they did not hesitate to employ spies, and were ready to
accept " delations " of " the suspect." The Board of Excise,
with or without instigation, ordered an inquiry to be made
into the conduct of their ganger : hearing of which he,
anticipating dismissal, sent off an excited letter to Mr
Graham, giving the lie direct to the allegations against
him. This was followed by another, January 1793, some-
what calmer in tone, but going into painful details of excul-
pation, and profuse in professions of loyalty to the " sacred
key-stone " of our constitution, the king. As far as pains
and penalties went the storm blew over, but hope of promo-
tion was at an end, and Burns felt that he had been through
the Valley of Humiliation, no salutary discipline for a soul
like his, and had to submit to an insolent reprimand. " Mr
Corbet," he writes, in a letter to his generous champion,
Erskine of Mar, " was instructed to enquire 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." Incredible as it may appear,
this ne plus ultra of Bumbledom has been recently defended
* This has been by some dogmatically denied, but the incident is
unlikely to have been invented.
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 59
on the ground that the poet, being " in the public employ,"
had no right " to dabble in politics," i.e., he was to be de-
barred from expressing his regard for two republics, with
both of which we were at peace, because the Tories happened
to be then in power. Burns was bound, with all good citizens,
to abstain from seditious courses, but his office held, we take
it, " aut vitam aut culpam," could not bind him always to
agree with the Ministry, nor had he sold Ins soul and body,
or Ins liberty of speech, for £7 a-year. He ran the risk of
every candidate for patronage in offending his possible
patrons, but the censure of the Board was an impertinence,
and that he felt it to be so the noble close of the letter to
Erskine, in which we have the best account of the matter,
clearly demonstrates. After this business the poet's first
resolve was to hold his peace, " I jouk and let the jaw gie
o'er : " but he chafed under his chains, and sometimes made
a noise in rattling them. To use his own image, he felt
sore, like iEsop's lion under an ass's kick. During the
spring '93, the bitterness breaks out in occasional letters,
notably in his answer to the admonitions of the now respect-
able Nicol and the recently published Political Catechism —
addressed to Cunningham — items of which have naturally
attracted attention. The writer of this and the nearly con-
temporaneous lines, " You're welcome to despots, Dumouriez,"
must have ceased to expect anything from Pitt or Dundas.
It is the clenching sarcasm of a man smarting under the
sense of neglect, and sick of hope deferred, whose fair-
weather friends were treating him as popular people treat
everyone under a cloud. Suspected politics, added to doubt-
ful religion, were too much to bear, and they looked black
upon him and fought shy of him. To be thought bad is
apt to make a man bad : to be excluded from the society of
equals is to be driven to that of inferiors. Fatigue and de-
spondency alternating with fits of restless irritation, Burns,
too much impressed with the maxim, " Better be the head
of the commonalty than the tail of the gentry," sought relief
among the lower ranks, where he found a shallow sympathy
and countenance in his now besetting sin. " Occasional
GO ROBERT BURNS.
hard drinking," he writes to Mrs Dunlop, " is the devil to
me. Against this I have again and again bent my resolu-
tion, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally
abandoned : it is the private parties among the hard-drink-
ing gentlemen . . . that do me the mischief." On the
morning after this letter was written, when the Eev. Mr
M'Morline came to baptise his child, he found that Burns
had never been in bed, having sat up all night in his own
house, with some boon companions.
The next year, 1794, opened with a course of indulgence
that twice proved disastrous. On the first occasion, having
proposed a toast, "May our success in the war" (the early
stages of which he always condemned) "be equal to the
justice of our cause," in presence of a fire-eating officer, he
narrowly escaped being dragged into a duel. The name of
this "lobster" is preserved by the fact of his encounter with
the poet, to whom, when the French really became aggressive,
it fell to w T rite the most stirring of our challenges of defence.
"Does haughty Gaul invasion threat" will survive Captain
Dods. On the second occasion, in consequence of his joining
in a freak with other over-heated guests, coming from the
dinner-table to Maria Kiddell's drawing-room, he lost for a
time the esteem of her family, and, what was of more moment,
of herself. Kissing, which " goes by favour," should never
be public, and her indignation, aggravated, it may be, by a
latent sense of the disparity of their ranks, was propor-
tioned to her affection for the man to whose genius she has
left the finest contemporary tribute. Next morning the
poet, duly contrite, addressed the lady in cries of prose and
verse that might have melted a stone, but she remaining
obdurate, Burns, who could never brook repulse, suddenly
passed from apology to lampoon. This completed the aliena-
tion, and made him regarded as beyond the pale, a " mauvais
sujet," with whom there was no dealing. The quarrel was
ultimately made up, but not before his friend, the Laird
of Carse, unfortunately involved in it, had died and been
lamented in the elegy, " No more ye warblers of the wood."
The only remaining event of the year worth recording is a visit
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 6 1
from his old acquaintance, Josiah Walker, whose sententious
comments on the occasion afterwards roused the wrath of
Christopher North. Nor is there much in the next, but the
gathering of the clouds on the entrance to the Valley of the
Shadow. Care, remorse, and embarrassment had done
their work in undermining a strong constitution. " What
a transient business is life," he writes (January 1) to Mrs
Dunlop, "very lately I was a boy; but t'other day I was a
young man, and I already begin to feel the frigid pulse and
stiff joints of old age coining fast over my frame." Walking
with a friend who proposed to him to join a county ball, he
shook his head, saying, " that's all over now," and adding the
oft-quoted verse of Lady Grissel Baillie. His prevailing
sentiment was that of his own couplet, characterised as the
concentration of many night-thoughts —
" The pale moon is setting beyond the white wave
And Time is setting wi' me O."
Yet, ever and anon, his vitality re-asserted itself, and out of
the mirk there flashed the immortal democratic creed —
" Is there for honest poverty
That hangs his head and a' that?"
In March we have a glint of sunshine ; he was reconciled
to Maria, again received her letters, criticised her verses, and
took heart to make a last appeal to Mr Heron for promotion.
In September, the death of his daughter again broke his
spirit and accelerated the close. His hand shook, his pulse
and appetite failed, and he sunk into an almost uniform
gloom : but to the last it was lit with silver streaks. From
the very Castle of Despair he wrote, " Contented wi' little
and canty wi' mair : " over the dark surface of the rising
waters there ripples the music of the lines —
" Their groves o' sweet myrtle let foreign lands reckon,
While bright beaming summers exalt the perfume,
Far dearer to me yon lone glen o' green breckan,
With the burn stealing under the lang yellow broom."
In January 1796, the poet, on his return from a gathering
at the Globe, fell asleep in the open air and caught a chill,
62 ROBERT BURNS.
developing into a rheumatic fever, with which he was during
the early months intermittently prostrate. On his partial
recovery, in April he wrote to Thomson, " I fear it will be
some time before I tune my lyre again. By Babel's streams
I have sat and wept. I have only known existence by the
pressure of sickness, and counted time by the repercussions
of pain. I close my eyes in misery, and open them without
hope. I look on the vernal day, and say with poor Fergus-
son —
" Say wherefore has an all-indulgent heaven
Life to the comfortless and wretched given."
May was a month of unusual brightness, but cutting east
winds went against him, and, though sometimes appearing in
the streets, he was so emaciated as hardly to be recognised.
His wife being from her condition unable to attend to him,
her place was supplied by the affectionate tenderness of
Jessie Lewars, who hovered about his couch, like the " little
fairy," who long afterwards ministered to the dying hours of
the matchless German lyrist, Heinrich Heine. To this girl,
the sister of a fellow exciseman, Burns addressed two of his
latest and sweetest songs with the stanzas —
" Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear,
Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet,
And sweet as their parting tear, Jessie."
• •••■•••
" O wert thou in the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt
I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee."
The poet himself was rapidly passing beyond the need of
shelter. On July 4th, he was sent for sea air to a watering-
place, Brow on the Solway, and there had a last meeting
with Mrs Biddell, saluting her with the question, " Well,
madam, have you any commands for the other world ?" He
spoke without fear of the approaching close, but expressed
anxiety for his wife and children, and the possible injury to
his fame from the publication of unguarded letters and
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 63
verses. " He lamented," we quote from the lady, " that he
had written many epigrams on persons against whom he en-
tertained no enmity, and many indifferent poetical pieces
which he feared would be thrust upon the world. . . . The
conversation was kept up with great evenness and animation
on his side. ... I had seldom seen Ms mind greater or
more collected." On the 10th, when his landlady wished to
let down the blinds against the dazzling of the sun, Burns
exclaimed, " let him shine, he will not shine long for me."
His peace of mind was unhappily distracted by the inade-
quacy of the allowance granted to officers on leave for illness,
and by a letter inopportunely arriving from a Dumfries
tradesman pressing for the payment of an account. This
drew forth two piteous appeals — one to Thomson, the other
to his cousin at Montrose — for the loan of small sums to
save him " from the horrors of a jail : " with the former he
enclosed his last lyrical fragment, "Fairest maid on Devon
Banks." The same day he addressed Mrs Dunlop complain-
ing of her long silence, she too having been influenced by
the "fama" of the preceding year. On the 14th, he
announced to Jean his arrival on the 18th. When
brought home he was so weak that he could not stand ;
but he was able to send to his father-in-law his last written
lines saying, " Do, for Heaven's sake, send Mrs Armour
here immediately." From the 19th to the end he was for
the most part speechless, " scarcely himsel' for half-an-hour
together," said Mrs Burns afterwards. At one time he was
found sitting in a corner of the room, and, on being put back
to bed, exclaimed, " Gilbert, Gilbert." Early on the 21st he
was in deep delirium, broken only by a few sentences, among
them a last flash of humour to an attendant volunteer,
" John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me."
The practice of lingering over the death-beds of great
men to peer and moralize is apt to be either foolish or im-
pertinent. The last utterances of Madame Eoland, Goethe,
or Byron may be memorable ; but we can draw no conclusion
as to their lives, or the truth of their views of life, from the
despairing agonies of Cowper, the celestial vision of Pope, or
64 ROBERT BURNS.
the serene composure of Hume. The last moments of Burns
were stormy, as his life ; an execration on the agent who had
sent him the dunning account — and the mighty Spirit passed.
On the 25 th, his remains were carried through Dumfries
amid throngs of people asking, " Who will be our poet now ?"
and buried with local honours. Shortly after the turf had
been laid on the mortal vesture of the immortal power, a
young lady with an attendant climbed at nightfall over the
kirk-yard stile, and strewed the grave with laurel leaves.
It was Maria Eiddell who had forgotten his epigrams and still
adored his memory. Burns died poor, but scarcely in debt,
owing but a few pounds to his friendly landlord, whose only
fault with him was that he did not have enough of his com-
pany. A subscription started for Ms family soon raised for
their relief the sum of £700, which enabled them to pre-
serve intact his little library and tide over evil days. The
poet had a hard struggle for bread, but a tithe of the stones
of his monuments would have kept himself and his
in affluence through all their lives. Scotland has had
sweet singers since his death, one of them (Tannahill)
with almost as tuneful a voice in rendering the beauties of
external nature ; but only two great writers — Scott and
Carlyle. Neither combined his lurid and passionate force
with the power of musical expression. In these respects his
only heir was the future lord of English verse, the boy
who was about to leave the shadows of Lach-na-gair for the
groves of Newstead.
III. — Eetrospect and Summary.
If the purpose of these records of the poet has been in any
degree fulfilled, there is little need to ask further what
manner of man he was, or to add a sermon to the half-
triumphant, half -tragic text : triumphant in that it was given
him to mature his faculties and achieve enduring work,
tragic in that, thinking of his own often defeated struggle, he
wrote " There is not among the inartyrologies so rueful a
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 65
narrative." Eeticence is rarely, if ever, found in conjunction
with genius. Even Shakespeare "unlocked his heart" in the
sonnets, and Goethe in the " Dichtung und Wahrheit." But
Burns is garrulous to excess ; least of all great writers, less
than his nearest mate, Byron (who burns blue lights within
otherwise transparent windows), did he or could he hide him-
self. He parades " the secrets of his prison house," joins a
carnival unmasked, and with an approach to indelicacy throws
open his chamber door. " I was drunk last night, this
forenoon I was polygamic, this evening I am sick and sorry,"
is the refrain, of his confession. Scotch to the core in his
perfervid heart, he wears it on his sleeve to be pecked at
by innumerable daws, and is, in this respect, — teste Thomas
Campbell, — "the most un-Scotch-like of Scotchmen." On the
other hand'he had all the ambition often unhappily charac-
teristic of his race. " Fate," he exclaims, " had cast my
station in the veriest shades of life, but never did a heart
pant more ardently than mine to be distinguished." His
youthful pride was, by his own account, apt to degenerate
into " envy." His career was haunted by a suspicion of
being patronised or insulted by rank or wealth, which
led him too willingly to associate with his inferiors and
to court the company of the wild " merry " rather than
the sober " grave." " Calculative creatures " he condemns
as inhumane ; for errors of impulse he has superabundant
charity ; he has " courted the acquaintance of blackguards,
and though disgraced by follies " has " often found among
them the noblest virtues." Burns' affection for the waifs and
strays of mankind, was the right side of the temperament
of which his own recklessness was the wrong. But his
practical sense, on occasion, asserted itself, in a manner worthy
of the canniest Scot, e.g., his refusal to stand surety for his
brother, his determination never to bring up his sons to any
learned profession, all his correspondence with Gilbert
and Creech. Burns is at his worst, where he is cautious,
almost cunning, as in some of the Clarinda letters, a few
relating to the Armours, and such passages as that on his
return from the West Highland tour where he talks of
E
OG HUBERT BUKXS.
women, as a fowler might do of his game. " Miss —
new off in a tangent, like a mounting lark. But I am an
old hawk at the sport and wrote her such a cool deliberate
prudent reply as brought my bird from her aerial
towerings, pop down at my feet like Corporal Trim's
hat." Similarly in his toast of " Mrs Mac," at Dumfries
dinners, his want of reserve amounts almost to a want
of fine feeling, and justifies the censure that if woman,
as a cynic has said, constituted the poet's religion, he
ought to have dealt with it more reverently. Equally
difficult is it to condone some of his vindictive epigrams.
" Judex damnatur," who can ignore those aberrations of
" Ayrshire's tutelary saint." The rest of the tragedy, " half
within and half without," is the commonplace of moralizing
commentary — that of hot blood, weak will, and straitened
circumstances dragging down an eagle's flight. When the
devil's advocate has done his worst, " the dissonance is lost
in the music of a great man's name." Tried in many
ways he was never tempted to do or to think anything
mean. The theme of his prevailing sincerity has been ex-
hausted by a sharer of many of his mental, exempted from
his physical, faults, Mr Carlyle. The " finesse " of the poet's
flirtations is at least on the surface. His amiable over-
estimates were genuine to the core. His magnanimity
amounted to imprudence ; his gratitude to all who ever did
him kindness to idolatry. Generosity in almsgiving, a
virtue though an easy one of the rich, impossible to the
poor, was not accessible to Burns ; but he had the harder
virtue, rare in our scrambling world, of cordially recogniz-
ing and extolling the men whom he held to be his peers.
His anxiety to push the sale of other people's books, as
evinced in his letters to Duncan, Tait, and Creech about
Grose, Mylne, and Mrs Kiddell, is a reproach to an age
when poets are animated by the spirit of monopolists. If
he loved praise, he was lavish of it. His benevolence that
overflowed the living world was, despite his polygamic
heats, concentrated in the intense domesticity of a good
brother and son, husband and father. His works have been
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREEB AND GENIUS. U7
called A manual of Independence ; and that his homage
to the "Lord of the lion heart" is no word boast, is seen
in his horror of debt, and almost fanatical dread of obliga-
tion : they are also models of a charity which goes far to
cover his own, as he made it cover the sins of others.
Everyone who knew Burns well in private life seems to
have loved him ; but he owed none of his popularity to
complaisance. Nothing in his character is more con-
spicuous than the shining courage that feared neither
false man nor false God, his intolerance of the com-
promises and impatience of the shifts which are the re-
proaches of his nation. Yet no man was ever more proud
of his nationality. The excess of patriotism which led
Fergusson to assail the Union and detest Dr Johnson passed
on to Burns. Here and there his humour sees a little rant
in it, as when he writes to Lord Buchan, " Your much loved
Scotia about whom you make such a racket ; " but his pre-
vailing tone is that of his letter to Lord Eglinton, " I have
all those prejudices. . . . There is scarcely anything to
which I am so alive as the honour and welfare of old Scotia ;
and, as a poet, I have no higher enjoyment than singing her
sons and daughters." Hence, perhaps, the provincialism of
his themes, which Mr Arnold with his " damnable iteration "
of " Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners " per-
versely confounds with provincialism of thought.* Hence,
* V. Introduction to Ward's "English Poets," p. xli. After the novel
remark, "The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems," Mr Arnold
proceeds, " Let us boldly say that of much of this poetry, a poetry dealing
perpetually with Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a
Scotchman's estimate is apt to be personal. A Scotchman is used to this
world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners ; he has a
tenderness for it ; he meets its poet half way. In this tender mood he
reads pieces like the Holy Fair or Halloween. But this world of Scotch
drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against a poet, not for him,
when it is not a partial countryman who reads him ; for in itself, it is not
a beautiful world, and no one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to
deal with a beautiful world. Burns's world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion,
and Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world ; even the
world of his Cottar's Saturday Night is not a beautiful world." Thereon
follow some pages of supercilious patronage of the poet who was, it seems,
" a man of vigorous understanding, and (need I say ?) a master of language,"
08 ROBERT BURNS.
rather than from his more Catholic qualities, the exagger-
ated homage that his countrymen have paid to his name.
The Continent champions the cosmopolite Byron, heavily
handicapped by his rank, against England ; Scotland has
thrown a shield over the errors of her most splendid
son, and, lance in rest, dares even her own pulpits to,
dethrone her " tutelary saint." Seldom has there been
a stranger or a more wholesome superstition, for on the
one hand Burns is the great censor of our besetting sins,
on the other he has lifted our best aspirations to a height
they never before attained. Puritans with a touch of poetry
have dwelt on the undoubted fact that he " purified " our
old songs. The commonplace criticism is correct, but so
inadequate as to leave the impression that he was an
inspired scavenger, whose function was to lengthen the
skirts of Scotland's "high-kilted Muse," and clip her
" raucle " tongue. His work was nobler, that of elevating and
intensifying our northern imagination. He has touched the
meanest animal shapes with Ithuriel's wand, and they have
sprung up " proudly eminent." His volumes owe their
popularity to their being an epitome of melodies, moods and
memories that had belonged for centuries to the national
life : but Burns has given them a new dignity, as well as a
deeper pathos, by combining an ideal element with the fullest
knowledge of common life and the shrewdest judgment on
it. He is the unconscious heir of Barbour, distilling the
spirit of the old poet's epic into a battle chant, and of
Dunbar, as the caustic satirist, the thistle as well as the rose
of his land. He is the conscious pupil of Eamsay, but he
leaves his master to make a social protest and lead a literary
revolt. Contrast the " Gentle Shepherd " with the " Jolly
Beggars" — the one is a court pastoral, like a minuet of the
ladies of Versailles on the sward of the Swiss village near
and mockery of his admirers. If the critic's knowledge of Burns may be
guaged by his belief that the Holy Fair is "met half way" in a mood of
" tenderness" for " Scotch religion," his criticism is harmless ; but in per-
petually playing with paradoxes Mr Arnold runs the risk of spoiling his
own "attic style" — the style of "a man of vigorous understanding, and
(need I say ?) a master of language."
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. G9
the Trianon, the other is like the march of the Mcenads with
Theroigne de Mericourt. Over all this masterpiece is poured
" a flood of liquid harmony : " in the acme of the two-edged
satire, aimed alike at laws and law-breakers, the graceless
crew are raised above the level of gipsies, footpads, and
rogues, and made, like Titans, to launch their thunders of
rebellion against the world. Ramsay adds to the rough tunes
and words of the ballads the refinement of the wits who, in
the "Easy" and "Johnstone" Clubs, talked, over their cups,
of Prior and Pope, Addison and Gay. Burns inspires them
with a fervour that thrills the most wooden of his race. He
has purified " John Anderson, my Joe," and brought it from
the bothie to the " happy fireside clime : " but the following
he has glorified : —
1. Semple (seventeenth century) — rudely- —
" Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never thought upon,
The flames of love extinguished
And freely past and gone,
Is thy kind heart now grown so cold,
In that loving breast of thine,
That thou canst never once reflect
On old langsyne."
2. Ramsay (eighteenth century) — classically —
" Methinks around us on each bough
A thousand Cupids play,
While through the groves I walk with you
Each object makes me gay ;
Since your return the sun and moon
With brighter beams do shine,
Streams murmur soft notes while they run
As they did langsyne."
3. Burns — immortally —
" We twa ha'e run about the braes,
And pou'd the gowans fine,
But we've wandered mony a weary foot
Sin' auld langsyne.
We twa ha'e paidl'd in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,
But seaSjbetween us braid ha'e roar'd
Sin' auld langsyne."
70 ROBERT BURNS.
It is the humanity of this and the like that has made
Burns pass into the breath of our nostrils. His " voice is
on the rolling air;" his arrows in every Scottish heart from
California to Cathay. He fed on the past literature of his
country as Chaucer on the old fields of English thought,
and
" Still the elements o' sang
In formless jumble, richt and wrang,
Went floating in his brain."
But, though as compared with Douglas, Lyndesay, &c, his
great power was brevity, he brought forth an hundred-fold.
First of the poets of his nation he struck the chord where
Love and Passion and Reality meet. We had had enough of
mere sentiment, enough of mere sense, enough of mere
sensuality. He came to pass them through a harmonizing
alembic. To this solid manhood, to this white heat, to the
force of language which has made his words and phrases
be compared to cannon balls, add the variety that stretches
from " Scots wha hae " to " Mary in Heaven," from " Duncan
Gray " to " Auld Lang Syne," — a lyric distance only exceeded
by the greater dramatic distance between Falstaff and Ariel,
the Walpurgis Nacht and Iphigenia, — and we can under-
stand the tardy fit of enthusiasm in which William Pitt
compared Burns to Shakespeare. He who sings alike of
Agincourt and Philippi, of Snug the joiner, and the " bank
whereon the wild thyme blows," has doubtless no mate in
the region of " Scotch drink, Scotch manners, Scotch reli-
gion ; " but we have no such testimony to the cloud-
compelling social genius of Shakespeare as everywhere
meets us in regard to Burns. He walked among men as a
god of either region. He had that glamour or fascination
which, for want of a better word called electric, gave their
influence to Irving, Chalmers, and Wilson, who have left
little that is readable behind them. Carlyle alone among
his successors, — representing the mixture of German ideal-
ism, John Knox morality, and the morbid spirit of our sad
critical age — Carlyle alone among great Scotch writers,
A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREEH AND GENIUS, 71
seems to have had this power: but his thunderous prose
wants the softness of his predecessor's verse. Swift, Gibbon,
Hume, and Burns are, in our island, the greatest literary
figures of the eighteenth ; as Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley,
and Byron are of the first half of the nineteenth century.
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