THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 6

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 6

In this new farm William Burns seemed to strike root, and thrive. He

was strong of body and ardent of mind: every day brought increase of

vigour to his three sons, who, though very young, already put their

hands to the plough, the reap-hook, and the flail. But it seemed that

nothing which he undertook was decreed in the end to prosper: after

four seasons of prosperity a change ensued: the farm was far from

cheap; the gains under any lease were then so little, that the loss of

a few pounds was ruinous to a farmer: bad seed and wet seasons had

their usual influence: "The gloom of hermits and the moil of

galley-slaves," as the poet, alluding to those days, said, were

endured to no purpose; when, to crown all, a difference arose between

the landlord and the tenant, as to the terms of the lease; and the

early days of the poet, and the declining years of his father, were

harassed by disputes, in which sensitive minds are sure to suffer.

 

Amid these labours and disputes, the poet's father remembered the

worth of religious and moral instruction: he took part of this upon

himself. A week-day in Lochlea wore the sober looks of a Sunday: he

read the Bible and explained, as intelligent peasants are accustomed

to do, the sense, when dark or difficult; he loved to discuss the

spiritual meanings, and gaze on the mystical splendours of the

Revelations. He was aided in these labours, first, by the

schoolmaster of Alloway-mill, near the Doon; secondly, by John

Murdoch, student of divinity, who undertook to teach arithmetic,

grammar, French, and Latin, to the boys of Lochlea, and the sons of

five neighboring farmers. Murdoch, who was an enthusiast in learning,

much of a pedant, and such a judge of genius that he thought wit

should always be laughing, and poetry wear an eternal smile, performed

his task well: he found Robert to be quick in apprehension, and not

afraid to study when knowledge was the reward. He taught him to turn

verse into its natural prose order; to supply all the ellipses, and

not to desist till the sense was clear and plain: he also, in their

walks, told him the names of different objects both in Latin and

French; and though his knowledge of these languages never amounted to

much, he approached the grammar of the English tongue, through the

former, which was of material use to him, in his poetic compositions.

Burns was, even in those early days, a sort of enthusiast in all that

concerned the glory of Scotland; he used to fancy himself a soldier of

the days of the Wallace and the Bruce: loved to strut after the

bag-pipe and the drum, and read of the bloody struggles of his country

for freedom and existence, till "a Scottish prejudice," he says, "was

poured into my veins, which will boil there till the flood-gates of

life are shut in eternal rest."

 

In this mood of mind Burns was unconsciously approaching the land of

poesie. In addition to the histories of the Wallace and the Bruce, he

found, on the shelves of his neighbours, not only whole bodies of

divinity, and sermons without limit, but the works of some of the best

English, as well as Scottish poets, together with songs and ballads

innumerable. On these he loved to pore whenever a moment of leisure

came; nor was verse his sole favourite; he desired to drink knowledge

at any fountain, and Guthrie's Grammar, Dickson on Agriculture,

Addison's Spectator, Locke on the Human Understanding, and Taylor's

scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, were as welcome to his heart as

Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, and Young. There is a mystery in

the workings of genius: with these poets in his head and hand, we see

not that he has advanced one step in the way in which he was soon to

walk, "Highland Mary" and "Tam O' Shanter" sprang from other

inspirations.

 

Burns lifts up the veil himself, from the studies which made him a

poet. "In my boyish days," he says to Moore, "I owed much to an old

woman (Jenny Wilson) who resided in the family, remarkable for her

credulity and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection

in the country of tales and songs, concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,

brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,

dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted

towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds

of poesie; but had so strong an effect upon my imagination that to

this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a look-out on

suspicious places." Here we have the young poet taking lessons in the

classic lore of his native land: in the school of Janet Wilson he

profited largely; her tales gave a hue, all their own, to many noble

effusions. But her teaching was at the hearth-stone: when he was in

the fields, either driving a cart or walking to labour, he had ever in

his hand a collection of songs, such as any stall in the land could

supply him with; and over these he pored, ballad by ballad, and verse

by verse, noting the true, tender, and the natural sublime from

affectation and fustian. "To this," he said, "I am convinced that I

owe much of my critic craft, such as it is." His mother, too,

unconsciously led him in the ways of the muse: she loved to recite or

sing to him a strange, but clever ballad, called "the Life and Age of

Man:" this strain of piety and imagination was in his mind when he

wrote "Man was made to Mourn."

 

He found other teachers--of a tenderer nature and softer influence.

"You know," he says to Moore, "our country custom of coupling a man

and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. In my

fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger

than myself: she was in truth a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass, and

unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which,

in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm

philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys. How she caught the

contagion I cannot tell; I never expressly said I loved her: indeed I

did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her,

when returning in the evenings from our labours; why the tones of her

voice made my heart strings thrill like an Æolian harp, and

particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and

fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and

thistles. Among other love-inspiring qualities, she sang sweetly, and

it was her favourite reel to which I attempted to give an embodied

vehicle in rhyme; thus with me began love and verse." This intercourse

with the fair part of the creation, was to his slumbering emotions, a

voice from heaven to call them into life and poetry.

 

From the school of traditionary lore and love, Burns now went to a

rougher academy. Lochlea, though not producing fine crops of corn, was

considered excellent for flax; and while the cultivation of this

commodity was committed to his father and his brother Gilbert, he was

sent to Irvine at Midsummer, 1781, to learn the trade of a

flax-dresser, under one Peacock, kinsman to his mother. Some time

before, he had spent a portion of a summer at a school in Kirkoswald,

learning mensuration and land-surveying, where he had mingled in

scenes of sociality with smugglers, and enjoyed the pleasure of a

silent walk, under the moon, with the young and the beautiful. At

Irvine he laboured by day to acquire a knowledge of his business, and

at night he associated with the gay and the thoughtless, with whom he

learnt to empty his glass, and indulge in free discourse on topics

forbidden at Lochlea. He had one small room for a lodging, for which

he gave a shilling a week: meat he seldom tasted, and his food

consisted chiefly of oatmeal and potatoes sent from his father's

house. In a letter to his father, written with great purity and

simplicity of style, he thus gives a picture of himself, mental and

bodily: "Honoured Sir, I have purposely delayed writing, in the hope

that I should have the pleasure of seeing you on new years' day, but

work comes so hard upon us that I do not choose to be absent on that

account. My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my

sleep is a little sounder, and on the whole, I am rather better than

otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees: the weakness of my

nerves had so debilitated my mind that I dare neither review past

wants nor look forward into futurity, for the least anxiety or

perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole

frame. Sometimes indeed, when for an hour or two my spirits are a

little lightened, I _glimmer_ a little into futurity; but my principal

and indeed my only pleasurable employment is looking backwards and

forwards in a moral and religious way. I am quite transported at the

thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu

to all the pains and uneasinesses, and disquietudes of this weary

life. As for the world, I despair of ever making a figure in it: I am

not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I

foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me, and I am in some

measure prepared and daily preparing to meet them. I have but just

time and paper to return you my grateful thanks for the lessons of

virtue and piety you have given me, which were but too much neglected

at the time of giving them, but which, I hope, have been remembered

ere it is yet too late." This remarkable letter was written in the

twenty-second year of his age; it alludes to the illness which seems

to have been the companion of his youth, a nervous headache, brought

on by constant toil and anxiety; and it speaks of the melancholy which

is the common attendant of genius, and its sensibilities, aggravated

by despair of distinction. The catastrophe which happened ere this

letter was well in his father's hand, accords ill with quotations from

the Bible, and hopes fixed in heaven:--"As we gave," he says, "a

welcome carousal to the new year, the shop took fire, and burnt to

ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence."

 

This disaster was followed by one more grievous: his father was well

in years when he was married, and age and a constitution injured by

toil and disappointment, began to press him down, ere his sons had

grown up to man's estate. On all sides the clouds began to darken: the

farm was unprosperous: the speculations in flax failed; and the

landlord of Lochlea, raising a question upon the meaning of the lease,

concerning rotation of crop, pushed the matter to a lawsuit, alike

ruinous to a poor man either in its success or its failure. "After

three years tossing and whirling," says Burns, "in the vortex of

litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail by a

consumption, which, after two years' promises, kindly slept in and

carried him away to where the 'wicked cease from troubling and the

weary are at rest.' His all went among the hell-hounds that prowl in

the kennel of justice. The finishing evil which brought up the rear of

this infernal file, was my constitutional melancholy being increased

to such a degree, that for three months I was in a state of mind

scarcely to be envied by the hopeless wretches who have got their

mittimus, 'Depart from me, ye cursed.'"

 

Robert Burns was now the head of his father's house. He gathered

together the little that law and misfortune had spared, and took the

farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, containing one hundred and eighteen

acres, at a rent of ninety pounds a year: his mother and sisters took

the domestic superintendence of home, barn, and byre; and he

associated his brother Gilbert in the labours of the land. It was made

a joint affair: the poet was young, willing, and vigorous, and

excelled in ploughing, sowing, reaping, mowing, and thrashing. His

wages were fixed at seven pounds per annum, and such for a time was

his care and frugality, that he never exceeded this small allowance.

He purchased books on farming, held conversations with the old and the

knowing; and said unto himself, "I shall be prudent and wise, and my

shadow shall increase in the land." But it was not decreed that these

resolutions were to endure, and that he was to become a mighty

agriculturist in the west. Farmer Attention, as the proverb says, is a

good farmer, all the world over, and Burns was such by fits and by

starts. But he who writes an ode on the sheep he is about to shear, a

poem on the flower that he covers with the furrow, who sees visions on

his way to market, who makes rhymes on the horse he is about to yoke,

and a song on the girl who shows the whitest hands among his reapers,

has small chance of leading a market, or of being laird of the fields

he rents. The dreams of Burns were of the muses, and not of rising

markets, of golden locks rather than of yellow corn: he had other

faults. It is not known that William Burns was aware before his death

that his eldest son had sinned in rhyme; but we have Gilbert's

assurance, that his father went to the grave in ignorance of his son's

errors of a less venial kind--unwitting that he was soon to give a

two-fold proof of both in "Rob the Rhymer's Address to his Bastard

Child"--a poem less decorous than witty.

 

The dress and condition of Burns when he became a poet were not at all

poetical, in the minstrel meaning of the word. His clothes, coarse and

homely, were made from home-grown wool, shorn off his own sheeps'

backs, carded and spun at his own fireside, woven by the village

weaver, and, when not of natural hodden-gray, dyed a half-blue in the

village vat. They were shaped and sewed by the district tailor, who

usually wrought at the rate of a groat a day and his food; and as the

wool was coarse, so also was the workmanship. The linen which he wore

was home-grown, home-hackled, home-spun, home-woven, and

home-bleached, and, unless designed for Sunday use, was of coarse,

strong harn, to suit the tear and wear of barn and field. His shoes

came from rustic tanpits, for most farmers then prepared their own

leather; were armed, sole and heel, with heavy, broad-headed nails, to

endure the clod and the road: as hats were then little in use, save

among small lairds or country gentry, westland heads were commonly

covered with a coarse, broad, blue bonnet, with a stopple on its flat

crown, made in thousands at Kilmarnock, and known in all lands by the

name of scone bonnets. His plaid was a handsome red and white

check--for pride in poets, he said, was no sin--prepared of fine wool

with more than common care by the hands of his mother and sisters, and

woven with more skill than the village weaver was usually required to

exert. His dwelling was in keeping with his dress, a low, thatched

house, with a kitchen, a bedroom and closet, with floors of kneaded

clay, and ceilings of moorland turf: a few books on a shelf, thumbed

by many a thumb; a few hams drying above head in the smoke, which was

in no haste to get out at the roof--a wooden settle, some oak chairs,

chaff beds well covered with blankets, with a fire of peat and wood

burning at a distance from the gable wall, on the middle of the floor.

His food was as homely as his habitation, and consisted chiefly of

oatmeal-porridge, barley-broth, and potatoes, and milk. How the muse

happened to visit him in this clay biggin, take a fancy to a clouterly

peasant, and teach him strains of consummate beauty and elegance, must

ever be a matter of wonder to all those, and they are not few, who

hold that noble sentiments and heroic deeds are the exclusive portion

of the gently nursed and the far descended.

 

Of the earlier verses of Burns few are preserved: when composed, he

put them on paper, but the kept them to himself: though a poet at

sixteen, he seems not to have made even his brother his confidante

till he became a man, and his judgment had ripened. He, however, made

a little clasped paper book his treasurer, and under the head of

"Observations, Hints, Songs, and Scraps of Poetry," we find many a

wayward and impassioned verse, songs rising little above the humblest

country strain, or bursting into an elegance and a beauty worthy of

the highest of minstrels. The first words noted down are the stanzas

which he composed on his fair companion of the harvest-field, out of

whose hands he loved to remove the nettle-stings and the thistles: the

prettier song, beginning "Now westlin win's and slaughtering guns,"

written on the lass of Kirkoswald, with whom, instead of learning

mensuration, he chose to wander under the light of the moon: a strain

better still, inspired by the charms of a neighbouring maiden, of the

name of Annie Ronald; another, of equal merit, arising out of his

nocturnal adventures among the lasses of the west; and, finally, that

crowning glory of all his lyric compositions, "Green grow the rashes."

This little clasped book, however, seems not to have been made his

confidante till his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year: he probably

admitted to its pages only the strains which he loved most, or such as

had taken a place in his memory: at whatever age it was commenced, he

had then begun to estimate his own character, and intimate his

fortunes, for he calls himself in its pages "a man who had little art

in making money, and still less in keeping it."

 

We have not been told how welcome the incense of his songs rendered

him to the rustic maidens of Kyle: women are not apt to be won by the

charms of verse; they have little sympathy with dreamers on Parnassus,

and allow themselves to be influenced by something more substantial

than the roses and lilies of the muse. Burns had other claims to their

regard then those arising from poetic skill: he was tall, young,

good-looking, with dark, bright eyes, and words and wit at will: he

had a sarcastic sally for all lads who presumed to cross his path, and

a soft, persuasive word for all lasses on whom he fixed his fancy: nor

was this all--he was adventurous and bold in love trystes and love

excursions: long, rough roads, stormy nights, flooded rivers, and

lonesome places, were no letts to him; and when the dangers or labours

of the way were braved, he was alike skilful in eluding vigilant

aunts, wakerife mothers, and envious or suspicions sisters: for rivals

he had a blow as ready us he had a word, and was familiar with snug

stack-yards, broomy glens, and nooks of hawthorn and honeysuckle,

where maidens love to be wooed. This rendered him dearer to woman's

heart than all the lyric effusions of his fancy; and when we add to

such allurements, a warm, flowing, and persuasive eloquence, we need

not wonder that woman listened and was won; that one of the most

charming damsels of the West said, an hour with him in the dark was

worth a lifetime of light with any other body; or that the

accomplished and beautiful Duchess of Gordon declared, in a latter

day, that no man ever carried her so completely off her feet as Robert

Burns.

 

It is one of the delusions of the poet's critics and biographers, that

the sources of his inspiration are to be found in the great classic

poets of the land, with some of whom he had from his youth been

familiar: there is little or no trace of them in any of his

compositions. He read and wondered--he warmed his fancy at their

flame, he corrected his own natural taste by theirs, but he neither

copied nor imitated, and there are but two or three allusions to Young

and Shakspeare in all the range of his verse. He could not but feel

that he was the scholar of a different school, and that his thirst was

to be slaked at other fountains. The language in which those great

bards embodied their thoughts was unapproachable to an Ayrshire

peasant; it was to him as an almost foreign tongue: he had to think

and feel in the not ungraceful or inharmonious language of his own

vale, and then, in a manner, translate it into that of Pope or of

Thomson, with the additional difficulty of finding English words to

express the exact meaning of those of Scotland, which had chiefly been

retained because equivalents could not be found in the more elegant

and grammatical tongue. Such strains as those of the polished Pope or

the sublimer Milton were beyond his power, less from deficiency of

genius than from lack of language: he could, indeed, write English

with ease and fluency; but when he desired to be tender or

impassioned, to persuade or subdue, he had recourse to the Scottish,

and he found it sufficient.

 

The goddesses or the Dalilahs of the young poet's song were, like the

language in which he celebrated them, the produce of the district; not

dames high and exalted, but lasses of the barn and of the byre, who

had never been in higher company than that of shepherds or ploughmen,

or danced in a politer assembly than that of their fellow-peasants, on

a barn-floor, to the sound of the district fiddle. Nor even of these

did he choose the loveliest to lay out the wealth of his verse upon:

he has been accused, by his brother among others, of lavishing the

colours of his fancy on very ordinary faces. "He had always," says

Gilbert, "a jealousy of people who were richer than himself; his love,

therefore, seldom settled on persons of this description. When he

selected any one, out of the sovereignty of his good pleasure, to whom

he should pay his particular attention, she was instantly invested

with a sufficient stock of charms out of the plentiful stores of his

own imagination: and there was often a great dissimilitude between his

fair captivator, as she appeared to others and as she seemed when

invested with the attributes he gave her." "My heart," he himself,

speaking of those days, observes, "was completely tinder, and was

eternally lighted up by some goddess or other." Yet, it must be

acknowledged that sufficient room exists for believing that Burns and

his brethren of the West had very different notions of the captivating

and the beautiful; while they were moved by rosy checks and looks of

rustic health, he was moved, like a sculptor, by beauty of form or by

harmony of motion, and by __EXPRESSION__, which lightened up ordinary

features and rendered them captivating. Such, I have been told, were

several of the lasses of the West, to whom, if he did not surrender

his heart, he rendered homage: and both elegance of form and beauty of

face were visible to all in those of whom he afterwards sang--the

Hamiltons and the Burnets of Edinburgh, and the Millers and M'Murdos

of the Nith.

 

The mind of Burns took now a wider range: he had sung of the maidens

of Kyle in strains not likely soon to die, and though not weary of the

softnesses of love, he desired to try his genius on matters of a

sterner kind--what those subjects were he tells us; they were homely

and at hand, of a native nature and of Scottish growth: places

celebrated in Roman story, vales made famous in Grecian song--hills of

vines and groves of myrtle had few charms for him. "I am hurt," thus

he writes in August, 1785, "to see other towns, rivers, woods, and

haughs of Scotland immortalized in song, while my dear native county,

the ancient Baillieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous in

both ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike race of

inhabitants--a county where civil and religious liberty have ever

found their first support and their asylum--a county, the birth-place

of many famous philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the scene of

many great events recorded in history, particularly the actions of the

glorious Wallace--yet we have never had one Scotch poet of any

eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands

and sequestered scenes of Ayr. and the mountainous source and winding

sweep of the Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, and Tweed. This is a

complaint I would gladly remedy, but, alas! I am far unequal to the

task, both in genius and education." To fill up with glowing verse the

outline which this sketch indicates, was to raise the long-laid spirit

of national song--to waken a strain to which the whole land would

yield response--a miracle unattempted--certainly unperformed--since

the days of the Gentle Shepherd. It is true that the tongue of the

muse had at no time been wholly silent; that now and then a burst of

sublime woe, like the song of "Mary, weep no more for me," and of

lasting merriment and humour, like that of "Tibbie Fowler," proved

that the fire of natural poesie smouldered, if it did not blaze; while

the social strains of the unfortunate Fergusson revived in the city,

if not in the field, the memory of him who sang the "Monk and the

Miller's wife." But notwithstanding these and other productions of

equal merit, Scottish poesie, it must be owned, had lost much of its

original ecstasy and fervour, and that the boldest efforts of the

muse no more equalled the songs of Dunbar, of Douglas, of Lyndsay, and

of James the Fifth, than the sound of an artificial cascade resembles

the undying thunders of Corra.

 

To accomplish this required an acquaintance with man beyond what the

forge, the change-house, and the market-place of the village supplied;

a look further than the barn-yard and the furrowed field, and a

livelier knowledge and deeper feeling of history than, probably, Burns

ever possessed. To all ready and accessible sources of knowledge he

appears to have had recourse; he sought matter for his muse in the

meetings, religious as well as social, of the district--consorted with

staid matrons, grave plodding farmers--with those who preached as well

as those who listened--with sharp-tongued attorneys, who laid down the

law over a Mauchline gill--with country squires, whose wisdom was

great in the game-laws, and in contested elections--and with roving

smugglers, who at that time hung, as a cloud, on all the western coast

of Scotland. In the company of farmers and fellow-peasants, he