by Will Durant
But, mousie, thou art no thy lane*
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best laid schemes o’ mice and men
Gang aft a-gley.
Almost as proverbial are the lines that end the poem “To a Louse on Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church”:
O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us.73
To make sure that his little book would be welcomed, Burns capped it with “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”: the farmer resting after a week of heavy toil; his wife and children gathering about him, each with a tale of the day; the oldest daughter timidly introducing the shy courter; the happy sharing in the simple fare; the Bible-reading by the father; the united prayer. To this pleasant picture Burns added a patriotic apostrophe to “Scotia, my dear, my native soil!”—Of the 612 copies printed all but three were sold in four weeks, netting Burns twenty pounds.
He had thought of using the proceeds to pay for passage to America; instead he devoted them to a sojourn in Edinburgh. Arriving there on a borrowed horse in November, 1786, he shared a room and bed with another rural youth. Some noisy harlots occupied the floor above them.74 The favorable reception of his book by Edinburgh reviewers opened doors to him; for a season he was an idol of polite society. Sir Walter Scott described him:
I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-87 when Burns came first to Edinburgh.... I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson, where there were several gentlemen of literary reputation. … His person was strong and robust; his wanness rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity. … His countenance massive, … the eye large and of a dark cast, which glowed … when he spoke. … Among the men, who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least forwardness.75
Burns was encouraged to issue an enlarged edition of his poems. To give the new volume added substance he proposed to include one of his major productions, “The Jolly Beggars,” which he had not ventured to print in the Kilmarnock volume. It described an assemblage of tramps, paupers, criminals, poets, fiddlers, harlots, and crippled, derelict soldiers in Nancy Gibson’s alehouse at Mauchline. Burns put into their mouths the most candid and unrepentant autobiographies, and ended the’medley with a drunken chorus:
A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty’s a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest.76
Hugh Blair, scholar and preacher, expressed alarm at the thought of publishing such a snub to the virtues; Burns yielded, and later forgot that he had written the poem;77 a friend preserved it, and it saw the light in 1799.
The Edinburgh editor sold some three thousand copies, netting Burns £ 450. He bought a mare and rode out (May 5, 1787) into the Highlands, and then across the Tweed to sample England. On June 9 he visited his relatives at Mossgiel, and called on Jean Armour; she received him warmly, and conceived again. Back in Edinburgh, he met Mrs. Agnes M’Lehose. At seventeen she had married a Glasgow surgeon; at twenty-one (1780) she left him, taking her children with her, and settled down to “frugal decency” in the capital. She invited Burns to her home; he fell in love with her without delay; apparently she did not give herself to him, for he continued to love her. They exchanged letters and poems, his signed “Sylvander,” hers “Clarinda.” In 1791 she decided to go and rejoin her husband in Jamaica; Burns sent her, as his farewell, some tender lines:
Ae* fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae farewell, and then forever! . . .
Had we never lov’d sae kindly,
Had we never lov’d sae blindly,
Never met nor never parted,
We had ne’er been brokenhearted.78
She found her husband living with a Negro waitress; she returned to Edinburgh.
His passion for her being unfulfilled, Burns sought companionship and revelry with a local club, the Crochallan Fencibles—men pledged to the defense of their city. There wine and women were the lares et penates, and bawdy reigned. For them Burns collected old Scots songs, and added some of his own; several of these found anonymous and esoteric publication in 1800 as The Merry Muses of Caledonia. Burns’s membership in this club, his open scorn of class distinctions,79 and his frank expression of radical views in religion and politics rapidly ended his welcome in Edinburgh society.
He tried to secure a post as a tax collector; repeatedly put off, he resigned himself to another venture in farming. In February, 1788, he rented the Ellisland farm, five miles from Dumfries, twelve from Carlyle’s Craigen-puttock. The owner, who candidly described the soil as “in the most miserable state of exhaustion,”80 advanced the poet £ 300 to build a farmhouse and fence the field; Burns was to pay fifty pounds annually for three years, then seventy pounds. Meanwhile Jean Armour gave birth to twins (March 3, 1788), who soon died. Some time before April 28 Burns married her; with her one surviving child of the four she had borne him she came to serve him faithfully as wife and housekeeper at Ellisland. She gave him another child, whom Burns called “my chef-d’oeuvre in that species of manufacture, as I look upon ‘Tarn o’Shanter’ to be my standard performance in the political line.”81 In 1790 he became intimate with Anna Park, waitress in a Dumfries tavern; in March, 1791, she bore him a child, which Jean took and brought up with her own.82
Life was hard at Ellisland. Nevertheless he continued to write great poetry. There he added two famous stanzas to an old drinking song, “Auld Lang Syne.” Burns worked until he too, like his father, broke down. He was glad to be appointed (July 14, 1788) an exciseman, and so to travel about the country gauging casks, examining victualers, chandlers, and tanners, and reporting to the Excise Board in Edinburgh. Despite frequent bouts with John Barleycorn he seems to have satisfied the board. In November, 1791, he sold his farm at a profit, and moved with Jean and the three children to a house in Dumfries.
He offended the respectable folk of the town by frequenting the taverns, and coming home drunk, on many occasions, to patient Jean.83 He continued to be a great poet; in those five years at Dumfries he composed “Ye banks an’ braes o’ bonnie Doon,” “Scots wha’ hae wi’ Wallace bled,” and “O my luve’s like a red, red rose.” Finding no mental mate in his wife, he corresponded with—sometimes visited—Mrs. Frances Dunlop, who had in her veins some residue of Wallace’s blood; she strove to tame Burns’s morals and vocabulary, not always to the benefit of his verse. He appreciated better the five-pound notes she sent him now and then.84
He endangered his commission as exciseman by his radical views. He told George III, in fifteen excellent stanzas, to get rid of his corrupt ministers, and advised the Prince of Wales to end his dissipations, and his “rattlin’ dice withe Charlie [Fox],” if he wished to inherit the throne.85 In a letter to the Edinburgh Courant he applauded America’s Declaration of Independence, and in 1789 he was an “enthusiastic votary” of the French Revolution. In 1795 he sent out a blast against rank distinctions:
Is there for honest poverty
That hings* his head and a’ that?
The coward slave, we pass him by;
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Our toils obscure, an’ a’ that,
. The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd* for a’ that.
. … . … . … . .
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.
Ye see yon birkiet† ca’d a lord,
Wha’ struts an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof‡ for a’ that. . . .
Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree§ an’ a’ that.
For a�
�� that an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet, for a’ that,
That man to man the world o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.
Complaints were made to the Excise Board that such a radical was no fit man to check chandlers and gauge casks, but the commissioners forgave him for his love and praise of Scotland. The ninety pounds a year his post brought him hardly sufficed to keep him in oats and ale. He continued to roam sexually, and in 1793 Mrs. Maria Ridell, who confessed his “irresistible power of attraction,” bore him a child. His repeated intoxication at last weakened his mind and his pride. Like Mozart in this same decade, he sent begging letters to his friends.86 Stories went around that he had syphilis, and had been found, one bitter morning in January, 1796, lying drunken in the snow.87 These reports have been criticized as unconfirmed heresy, and Scottish doctors describe Burns’s final illness as rheumatic fever impairing the heart.88 Three days before his death he wrote to his father-in-law: “Do, for Heaven’s sake, send Mrs. Armour here immediately. My wife is hourly expecting to be put to bed. Good God! What a situation for her to be in, poor girl, without a friend!”89 Then he took to his bed, and on July 21, 1796, he died. While he was being buried his wife gave birth to a son. Friends raised a fund to care for her, and she, strong of frame and heart, lived till 1834.
VI. JAMES BOSWELL**
1. The Cub
He had royal blood in him. His father, Alexander Boswell, Laird of Au-chinleck in Ayrshire and judge of the Scottish Court of Session, was descended from the Earl of Arran, a great-grandson of James II of Scotland. His mother was descended from the third Earl of Lennox, who was grandfather of Lord Darnley, who was father of James VI. James Boswell was born in Edinburgh October 29, 1740. As the eldest of three sons he was heir to the modest estate of Auchinleck (which he pronounced “Affleck”); but, since his father lived till 1782, James had to be discontent with such income as the Laird allowed him. Brother John suffered in 1762 the first of several attacks of insanity. Boswell himself was oppressed with spells of hypochondria, for which his cures were the amnesia of alcohol and the warmth of female forms. His mother taught him the Presbyterian Calvinist creed, which had a warmth of its own. “I shall never forget,” he later wrote, “the dismal hours of apprehension that I have endured in my youth from narrow notions of religion, while my mind was lacerated with infernal horror.”90 Throughout his life he oscillated between faith and doubt, piety and venery, and never achieved more than momentary integration or content.
After some tutoring at home, he was sent to the University of Edinburgh, then to Glasgow, where he attended the lectures of Adam Smith and studied law. At Glasgow he met actors and actresses, some of them Catholic. It seemed to him that their religion was more compatible than Calvinism with a jolly life; he liked especially the doctrine of purgatory, which allowed a sinner to be saved after a few aeons of burning. Suddenly James rode off to London (March, 1760), and joined the Roman Church.
His alarmed father sent a plea to the Earl of Eglinton, an Ayrshire neighbor living in London, to take James in hand. The Earl pointed out to the youth that as a Catholic he could never practice law, or enter Parliament, or inherit Auchinleck. James returned to Scotland and the Kirk, and lived under the paternal roof and eye; but, as the judge was busy, his son managed to “catch a Tartar”91—the first of his many bouts with venereal disease. Fearing that this reckless youth, on inheriting Auchinleck, would squander the estate in revelry, the father persuaded him, in return for an annuity of £ 100, to sign a document giving the future management of the property to trustees named by Boswell Senior.
On October 29, 1761, James came of age, and his annuity was doubled. In the following March he impregnated Peggy Doig; in July he passed his bar examination. On November 1, 1762, leaving ten pounds to Peggy, he set out for London. (Her child was born a few days later; Boswell never saw it.) In London he took a comfortable room in Downing Street. By November 25 he “was really unhappy for want of women”;92 but he remembered his infection, and “the surgeons’ fees in this city are very high.”93 So he steeled himself to continence “till I got some safe girl, or was liked by some woman of fashion.”94 His impression was that London provided every variety of courtesan, “from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night down to the civil nymph … who … will resign her engaging person to your honor for a pint of wine and a shilling.”95 He developed a connection with “a handsome actress,” Louisa, whose long resistance seemed to attest hygiene. Finally he persuaded her, and achieved quintuple ecstasy; “she declared I was a prodigy.”96 Eight days later he discovered that he had gonorrhea. By February 27 he felt cured; on March 25 he picked up a streetwalker, and “engaged her in armor” (with a prophylactic sheath). On March 27 “I heard service at St. Dunstan’s Church.” On March 31 “I strolled into the Park and took the first whore I met.”97 During the next four months Boswell’s London Journal records similar bouts—on Westminster Bridge, in Shakespeare’s Head Tavern, in the park, in a tavern on the Strand, in the Temple law courts, in the girl’s home.
This, of course, is only one side of the picture of a man, and to group these scattered episodes in one paragraph gives a false impression of Bos-well’s life and character. The other side of him was his “enthusiastic love of great men.”98 His first catch in this pursuit was Garrick, who sipped Boswell’s compliments and took to him readily. But James aimed at the top. In Edinburgh he had heard Thomas Sheridan describe the erudition and meaty conversation of Samuel Johnson. It would be a “kind of glory” to meet this pinnacle of London’s literary life.
Chance helped him. On May 16, 1763, Boswell was drinking tea in Thomas Davies’ bookshop in Russell Street when “a man of most dreadful appearance” entered. Boswell recognized him from a portrait of Johnson by Reynolds. He begged Davies not to reveal that he came from Scotland; Davies “roguishly” revealed it at once. Johnson did not lose the opportunity to remark that Scotland was a good country to come from; Boswell winced. Johnson complained that Garrick had refused him a free ticket for Miss Williams to a current play; Boswell ventured to say, “Sir, I cannot think that Mr. Garrick would grudge such a trifle to you.” Johnson bore down on him: “Sir, I have known David Garrick longer than you have done, and I know no right you have to talk to me on the subject.” This hardly promised a lifelong friendship; Boswell was “stunned” and “mortified”; but after some more conversation “I was satisfied that though there was a roughness in his manner, there was no ill-nature in his disposition.”99
Eight days later, encouraged by Davies, and fortified by his pachydermatous audacity, Boswell presented himself at Johnson’s rooms in the Inner Temple, and was received with kindness if not with charm. On June 25 bear and cub supped together at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street. “I was quite proud to think on whom I was with.” On July 22 “Mr. Johnson and I had a room at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house.” “After this,” Boswell wrote in his journal, “I shall just mark Mr. Johnson’s memorabilia as they rise up in my memory.”100 So the great biography began.
When, at his father’s urging, Boswell left for the Netherlands (August 6, 1763) to study law, master and man jibed so well that Johnson, aged fifty-three, accompanied Boswell, aged twenty-two, to Harwich to see him off.
2. Boswell Abroad
He settled in Utrecht, studied law, learned Dutch and French, and (he tells us) read all of Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs. He suffered at the outset a severe attack of melancholy, upbraided himself as a worthless philanderer, and thought of suicide. He blamed his recent dissipation on his loss of religious faith. “I was once an infidel; I acted accordingly; I am now a Christian gentleman.”101 He drew up an “Inviolable Plan” of self-reform: he would prepare himself for the duties of a Scottish laird; he would “be steady to the Church of England,” and cleave to the Christian moral code. “Never talk of yourself,” but “reverence thyself. … Upon the whole you will be an excellent character.”102
He regained his inte
rest in life when he was accepted in the homes of the well-to-do Dutch. Now he dressed “in scarlet and gold, … white silk stockings, handsome pumps, … Barcelona handkerchief, and elegant toothpick case.”103 He fell in love with Isabella van Tuyll, known to her admirers as “Belle de Zuylen,” and also as “Zélide”; we have already paid our respects to her as one of many brilliant women in the Holland of those years. But she avoided marriage, and Boswell convinced himself that he had rejected her. He tried Mme. Geelvinck, a pretty widow, but found her “delicious and impregnable.”104 Finally “I determined to take a trip to Amsterdam and have a girl.” Arrived there, he “went to a bawdy house.... I was hurt to find myself in the sinks of gross debauchery.” The next day “I went to a chapel and heard a good sermon.... I then strolled through mean brothels in dirty lanes.”105 He regained “the dignity of human nature” on receiving from a friend a letter of introduction to Voltaire.
Having carried out his promise to his father that he would study faithfully at Utrecht, he received paternal permission and funds for the usual grand tour that crowned a young English gentleman’s education. He bade farewell to Zélide, sure she had tears of love in her eyes, and on June 18, 1764, he crossed the border into Germany. For almost two years thereafter he and Belle corresponded, exchanging compliments and barbs. From Berlin, July 9, he wrote:
As you and I, Zélide, are perfectly easy with each other, I must tell you that I am vain enough … as to imagine that you really was in love with me.... I am too generous not to undeceive you.... I would not be married to you to be a king. … My wife must be a character directly opposite to my dear Zélide, except in affection, in honesty, and in good humor.106
She did not answer. He wrote again on October 1, assuring her that she loved him; she did not answer. He wrote again on December 25:
Mademoiselle, I am proud, and I shall be proud always. You ought to be flattered by my attachment. I know not if I ought to have been equally flattered by yours. A man who has a heart and mind like mine is rare. A woman with many talents is not so rare. … Perhaps you are able to give me an explanation of your conduct toward me.107