Delphi Complete Works of Robert Burns (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Robert Burns

  Before leaving town, however, he had arranged three pieces of business, all bearing closely on his future life. First, he had secured for himself an appointment in the Excise through the kindness of “Lang Sandy Wood,” the surgeon who attended him when laid up with a bruised limb, and who had interceded with Mr. Graham of Fintray, the chief of the Excise Board, on Burns’ behalf. When he received his appointment, he wrote to Miss Chalmers, “I have chosen this, my dear friend, after mature deliberation. The question is not at what door of fortune’s palace shall we enter in, but what doors does she open for us. I was not likely to get anything to do. I got this without hanging-on, or mortifying solicitation; it is immediate bread, and though poor in comparison of the last eighteen months of my existence, ‘tis luxury in comparison of all my preceding life.”

  Next, he had concluded a bargain with Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, to lease his farm of Ellisland, on which he had long set his heart, and to which he had paid several visits in order to inspect it.

  Lastly, he had at last obtained a business settlement with Creech regarding the Second Edition of his Poems. Before this was effected, Burns had more than once lost his temper, and let Creech know his mind. Various accounts have been given of the profits that now accrued to Burns from the whole transaction. We cannot be far wrong in taking the estimate at which Dr. Chambers arrived, for on such a matter he could speak with authority. He sets down the poet’s profits at as nearly as possible 500l. Of this sum Burns gave 180l. to his brother Gilbert, who was now in pecuniary trouble. “I give myself no airs on this,” he writes, “for it was mere selfishness on my part; I was conscious that the wrong scale of the balance was pretty heavily charged, and I thought that throwing a little filial piety and fraternal affection into the scale in my favour, might help to smooth matters at the grand reckoning.” This money was understood by the family to be the provision due from Robert on behalf of his mother, the support of whom he was now, that he was setting up for himself, about to throw on his younger brother. Chambers seems to reckon that as another 120l. must have been spent by Burns on his tours, his accident, and his sojourn in Edinburgh since October, he could not have more than 200l. over, with which to set up at Ellisland. We see in what terms Burns had written to Clarinda on the 21st of March. On his leaving Edinburgh and returning to Ayrshire, he married Jean Armour, and forthwith acknowledged her in letters as his wife. This was in April, though it was not till August that he and Jean appeared before the Kirk-Session, and were formally recognized as man and wife by the Church.

  Whether, in taking this step, Burns thought that he was carrying out a legal, as well as a moral, obligation, we know not. The interpreters of the law now assert that the original marriage in 1786 had never been dissolved, and that the destruction of the promissory lines, and the temporary disownment of him by Jean and her family, could not in any way invalidate it. Indeed after all that had happened, for Burns to have deserted Jean, and married another, even if he legally could have done so, would have been the basest infidelity. Amid all his other errors and inconsistencies, and no doubt there were enough of these, we cannot but be glad for the sake of his good name that he now acted the part of an honest man, and did what he could to repair the much suffering and shame he had brought on his frail but faithful Jean.

  As to the reasons which determined Burns to marry Jean Armour, and not another, this is the account he himself gives when writing to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his most trusted correspondents, to whom he spoke out his real heart in a simpler, more natural way, than was usual with him in letter-writing: —

  “You are right that a bachelor state would have ensured me more friends; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in approaching my God, would seldom have been of the number. I found a once much-loved, and still much-loved, female, literally and truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled her to purchase a shelter; — there is no sporting with a fellow-creature’s happiness or misery. The most placid good-nature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure: these I think, in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read a page but the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than a penny pay wedding.”

  To Miss Chalmers he says: —

  “I have married my Jean. I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature’s happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a deposit, nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tittle-tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disquieted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the country.... A certain late publication of Scots poems she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the country, as she has the finest wood-note wild I ever heard.”

  There have been many comments on this turning-point in Burns’ life. Some have given him high praise for it, as though he had done a heroic thing in voluntarily sacrificing himself, when it might have been open to him to form a much higher connexion. But all such praise seems entirely thrown away. It was not, as it appears, open to him to form any other marriage legally; certainly it was not open to him morally. The remark of Lockhart is entirely true, that, “had he hesitated to make her his wife, whom he loved, and who was the mother of his children, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian.” Lockhart need hardly have added, “or into that misery of miseries, the remorse of a poet.”

  But even had law and morality allowed him to pass by Jean, — which they did not, — would it have been well for Burns, if he had sought, as one of his biographers regrets that he had not done, a wife among ladies of higher rank and more refined manners? That he could appreciate what these things imply, is evident from his own confession in looking back on his introduction to what is called society: “A refined and accomplished woman was a being altogether new to me, and of which I had formed a very inadequate idea.” It requires but little knowledge of the world and its ways to see the folly of all such regrets. Great disparity of condition in marriage seldom answers. And in the case of a wayward, moody man, with the pride, the poverty, and the irregularities of Burns, and the drudging toil which must needs await his wife, it is easy to see what misery such a marriage would have stored up for both. As it was, the marriage he made was, to put it at the lowest, one of the most prudent acts of his life. Jean proved to be all, and indeed more than all, he anticipates in the letters above given. During the eight years of their married life, according to all testimony, she did her part as a wife and mother with the most patient and placid fidelity, and bore the trials which her husband’s irregular habits entailed on her, with the utmost long-suffering. And after his death, during her long widowhood, she revered his memory, and did her utmost to maintain the honour of his name.

  With his marriage to his Ayrshire wife, Burns had bid farewell to Edinburgh, and to whatever high hopes it may have at anytime kindled within him, and had returned to a condition somewhat nearer to that in which he was born. With what feelings did he pass from this brilliant interlude, and turn the corner which led him back to the dreary road of commonplace drudgery, which he hoped to have escaped? There can be little doubt that his feelings were those of bitter disappointment. There had been, it is said, a marked contrast between the reception he had met with during his first and second winters in Edinburgh. As Allan Cunningham says, “On his first appearance the doors of the nobility opened spontaneously, ‘on golden hinges turning,’ and he ate spiced meats and drank rare wines, interchanging nods and smiles with high dukes and mighty earls. A colder reception awaited his second coming. The doors of lords and ladies opened with a tardy courtesy; he was received with a cold and measured stateliness, was se
ldom requested to stop, seldomer to repeat his visit; and one of his companions used to relate with what indignant feeling the poet recounted his fruitless calls and his uncordial receptions in the good town of Edinburgh.... He went to Edinburgh strong in the belief that genius such as his would raise him in society; he returned not without a sourness of spirit, and a bitterness of feeling.”

  When he did give vent to his bitterness, it was not into man’s, but into woman’s sympathetic ear that he poured his complaint. It is thus he writes, some time after settling at Ellisland, to Mrs. Dunlop, showing how fresh was still the wound within. “When I skulk into a corner lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, ‘What merits has he had, or what demerit have I had, in some previous state of existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the keys of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?... Often as I have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, it has suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the present human figure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his own consequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out a prospect-glass.’”

  This is a feeling which Burns has uttered in many a form of prose and verse, but which probably never possessed him more bitterly than when he retired from Edinburgh. Many persons in such circumstances may have felt thoughts of this kind pass over them for a moment. But they have felt ashamed of them as they rose, and have at once put them by. Burns no doubt had a severer trial in this way than most, but he never could overcome it, never ceased to chafe at that inequality of conditions which is so strongly fixed in the system in which we find ourselves.

  It was natural that he should have felt some bitterness at the changed countenance which Edinburgh society turned on him, and it is easy to be sarcastic on the upper ranks of that day for turning it; but were they really so much to blame? There are many cases under the present order of things, in which we are constrained to say, “It must needs be that offences come.” Taking men and things as they are, could it well have been otherwise?

  First, the novelty of Burns’s advent had worn off by his second winter in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always counts for something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men of Blair’s circle knew more of Burns’s ways and doings than at first, and what they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept that formidable memorandum-book already alluded to, in which he was supposed to sketch with unsparing hand, “stern likenesses” of his friends and benefactors. So little of a secret did he make of this, that we are told he sometimes allowed a visitor to have a look at the figures which he had sketched in his portrait-gallery. The knowledge that such a book existed was not likely to make Blair and his friends more desirous of his society.

  Again, the festivities at the Crochallan Club and other such haunts, the habits he there indulged in, and the associates with whom he consorted, these were well known. And it was not possible that either the ways, the conversation, or the cronies of the Crochallan Club could be welcomed in quieter and more polished circles. Men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp would hardly have been quite in place there.

  Again — what is much to the honour of Burns — he never in the highest access of his fame, abated a jot of his intimacy and friendship towards the men of his own rank, with whom he had been associated in his days of obscurity. These were tradesmen, farmers, and peasants. The thought of them, their sentiments, their prejudices and habits, if it had been possible, their very persons, he would have taken with him, without disguise or apology, into the highest circles of rank or of literature. But this might not be. It was impossible that Burns could take Mauchline with its belles, its Poosie-Nansies and its Souter Johnnies, bodily into the library of Dr. Blair or the drawing-room of Gordon Castle.

  A man, to whom it is open, must make his choice; but he cannot live at once in two different and widely sundered orders of society. To no one is it given, not even to men of genius great as that of Burns, for himself and his family entirely to overleap the barriers with which custom and the world have hedged us in, and to weld the extremes of society into one. To the speculative as well as to the practically humane man, the great inequality in human conditions presents, no doubt, a perplexing problem. A little less worldly pride, and a little more Christian wisdom and humility, would probably have helped Burns to solve it better than he did. But besides the social grievance, which though impalpable is very real, Burns had another more material and tangible. The great whom he had met in Edinburgh, whose castles he had visited in the country, might have done something to raise him at once above poverty and toil, and they did little or nothing. They had, indeed, subscribed liberally for his Second Edition, and they had got him a gauger’s post, with fifty or sixty pounds a year, that was all. What more could they, ought they to have done? To have obtained him an office in some one of the higher professions was not to be thought of, for a man cannot easily at the age of eight-and-twenty change his whole line and adapt himself to an entirely new employment. The one thing they might have combined to do, was to have compelled Dundas, or some other of the men then in power, to grant Burns a pension from the public purse. That was the day of pensions, and hundreds with no claim to compare with Burns’s were then on the pension list: 300l. a year would have sufficed to place him in comfort and independence, and could public money have been better spent? But though the most rigid economist might not have objected, would Burns have accepted such a benefaction, had it been offered? And if he had accepted it, would he not have chafed under the obligation, more even than he did in the absence of it? Such questions as these cannot but arise, as often as we think over the fate of Burns, and ask ourselves, if nothing could have been done to avert it? Though natural, they are vain. Things hold on their own course to their inevitable issues, and Burns left Edinburgh, and set his face first towards Ayrshire, then to Nithsdale, a saddened and embittered man.

  CHAPTER V. LIFE AT ELLISLAND.

  “Mr. Burns, you have made a poet’s not a farmer’s choice.” Such was the remark of Allan Cunningham’s father, land-steward to the laird of Dalswinton, when the poet turned from the low-lying and fertile farm of Foregirth, which Cunningham had recommended to him, and selected for his future home the farm of Ellisland. He was taken by the beautiful situation and fine romantic outlook of the poorest of several farms on the Dalswinton estate which were in his option. Ellisland lies on the western bank of the river Nith, about six miles above Dumfries. Looking from Ellisland eastward across the river, “a pure stream running there over the purest gravel,” you see the rich holms and noble woods of Dalswinton. Dalswinton is an ancient historic place, which has even within recorded memory more than once changed its mansion-house and its proprietor. To the west the eye falls on the hills of Dunscore, and looking northward up the Nith, the view is bounded by the heights that shut in the river towards Drumlanrig, and by the high conical hill of Corsincon, at the base of which the infant stream slips from the shire of Ayr into that of Dumfries. The farmsteading of Ellisland stands but a few yards to the west of the Nith. Immediately underneath there is a red scaur of considerable height, overhanging the stream, and the rest of the bank is covered with broom, through which winds a greensward path, whither Burns used to retire to meditate his songs. The farm extends to upwards of a hundred acres, part holm, part croft-land, of which the former yielded good wheat, the latter oats and potatoes. The lease was for nineteen years, and the rent fifty pounds for the first three years, seventy for the rest of the tack. The laird of Dalswinton, while Burns leased Ellisland, was Mr. Patrick Millar, not an ordinary laird, but one well known in his day for his scientific discoveries. There was no proper farm-house or offices on the farm — it was part of the bargain that Burn
s should build these for himself. The want of a house made it impossible for him to settle at once on his farm. His bargain for it had been concluded early in March (1788); but it was not till the 13th of June that he went to reside at Ellisland. In the interval between these two dates he went to Ayrshire, and completed privately, as we have seen, the marriage, the long postponement of which had caused him so much disquiet. With however great disappointment and chagrin he may have left Edinburgh, the sense that he had now done the thing that was right, and had the prospect of a settled life before him, gave him for a time a peace and even gladness of heart, to which he had for long been a stranger. We can, therefore, well believe what he tells us, that, when he had left Edinburgh, he journeyed towards Mauchline with as much gaiety of heart, ‘as a May-frog, leaping across the newly-harrowed ridge, enjoying the fragrance of the refreshed earth after the long-expected shower.’ Of what may be called the poet’s marriage settlement, we have the following details from Allan Cunningham: —

  “His marriage reconciled the poet to his wife’s kindred: there was no wedding portion. Armour was a respectable man, but not opulent. He gave his daughter some small store of plenishing; and, exerting his skill as a mason, wrought his already eminent son-in-law a handsome punch-bowl in Inverary marble, which Burns lived to fill often, to the great pleasure both of himself and his friends.... Mrs. Dunlop bethought herself of Ellisland, and gave a beautiful heifer; another friend contributed a plough. The young couple from love to their native county ordered their furniture from a wright in Mauchline; the farm-servants, male and female, were hired in Ayrshire, a matter of questionable prudence, for the mode of cultivation is different from that of the west, and the cold humid bottom of Mossgiel bears no resemblance to the warm and stony loam of Ellisland.”