THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 8

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 8

How the distinction which he desired as a poet was to be obtained,

was, to a poor bard in a provincial place, a sore puzzle: there were

no enterprising booksellers in the western land, and it was not to be

expected that the printers of either Kilmarnock or Paisley had money

to expend on a speculation in rhyme: it is much to the honour of his

native county that the publication which he wished for was at last

made easy. The best of his poems, in his own handwriting, had found

their way into the hands of the Ballantynes, Hamiltons, Parkers, and

Mackenzies, and were much admired. Mrs. Stewart, of Stair and Afton, a

lady of distinction and taste, had made, accidentally, the

acquaintance both of Burns and some of his songs, and was ready to

befriend him; and so favourable was the impression on all hands, that

a subscription, sufficient to defray the outlay of paper and print,

was soon filled up--one hundred copies being subscribed for by the

Parkers alone. He soon arranged materials for a volume, and put them

into the hands of a printer in Kilmarnock, the Wee Johnnie of one of

his biting epigrams. Johnnie was startled at the unceremonious freedom

of most of the pieces, and asked the poet to compose one of modest

language and moral aim, to stand at the beginning, and excuse some of

those free ones which followed: Burns, whose "Twa Dogs" was then

incomplete, finished the poem at a sitting, and put it in the van,

much to his printer's satisfaction. If the "Jolly Beggars" was omitted

for any other cause than its freedom of sentiment and language, or

"Death and Doctor Hornbook" from any other feeling than that of being

too personal, the causes of their exclusion have remained a secret. It

is less easy to account for the emission of many songs of high merit

which he had among his papers: perhaps he thought those which he

selected were sufficient to test the taste of the public. Before he

printed the whole, he, with the consent of his brother, altered his

name from Burness to Burns, a change which, I am told, he in after

years regretted.

 

In the summer of the year 1786, the little volume, big with the hopes

and fortunes of the bard made its appearance: it was entitled simply,

"Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect; by Robert Burns;" and

accompanied by a modest preface, saying, that he submitted his book to

his country with fear and with trembling, since it contained little of

the art of poesie, and at the best was but a voice given, rude, he

feared, and uncouth, to the loves, the hopes, and the fears of his own

bosom. Had a summer sun risen on a winter morning, it could not have

surprised the Lowlands of Scotland more than this Kilmarnock volume

surprised and delighted the people, one and all. The milkmaid sang his

songs, the ploughman repeated his poems; the old quoted both, and

ever the devout rejoiced that idle verse had at last mixed a tone of

morality with its mirth. The volume penetrated even into Nithsdale.

"Keep it out of the way of your children," said a Cameronian divine,

when he lent it to my father, "lest ye find them, as I found mine,

reading it on the Sabbath." No wonder that such a volume made its way

to the hearts of a peasantry whose taste in poetry had been the marvel

of many writers: the poems were mostly on topics with which they were

familiar: the language was that of the fireside, raised above the

vulgarities of common life, by a purifying spirit of __EXPRESSION__ and

the exalting fervour of inspiration: and there was such a brilliant

and graceful mixture of the elegant and the homely, the lofty and the

low, the familiar and the elevated--such a rapid succession of scenes

which moved to tenderness or tears; or to subdued mirth or open

laughter--unlooked for allusions to scripture, or touches of sarcasm

and scandal--of superstitions to scare, and of humour to

delight--while through the whole was diffused, as the scent of flowers

through summer air, a moral meaning--a sentimental beauty, which

sweetened and sanctified all. The poet's expectations from this little

venture were humble: he hoped as much money from it as would pay for

his passage to the West Indies, where he proposed to enter into the

service of some of the Scottish settlers, and help to manage the

double mystery of sugar-making and slavery.

 

The hearty applause which I have recorded came chiefly from the

husbandman, the shepherd, and the mechanic: the approbation of the

magnates of the west, though not less-warm, was longer in coming. Mrs.

Stewart of Stair, indeed, commended the poems and cheered their

author: Dugald Stewart received his visits with pleasure, and wondered

at his vigour of conversation as much as at his muse: the door of the

house of Hamilton was open to him, where the table was ever spread,

and the hand ever ready to help: while the purses of the Ballantynes

and the Parkers were always as open to him as were the doors of their

houses. Those persons must be regarded as the real patrons of the

poet: the high names of the district are not to be found among those

who helped him with purse and patronage in 1786, that year of deep

distress and high distinction. The Montgomerys came with their praise

when his fame was up; the Kennedys and the Boswells were silent: and

though the Cunninghams gave effectual aid, it was when the muse was

crying with a loud voice before him, "Come all and see the man whom I

delight to honour." It would be unjust as well as ungenerous not to

mention the name of Mrs. Dunlop among the poet's best and early

patrons: the distance at which she lived from Mossgiel had kept his

name from her till his poems appeared: but his works induced her to

desire his acquaintance, and she became his warmest and surest friend.

 

To say the truth, Burns endeavoured in every honourable way to obtain

the notice of those who had influence in the land: he copied out the

best of his unpublished poems in a fair hand, and inserting them in

his printed volume, presented it to those who seemed slow to buy: he

rewarded the notice of this one with a song--the attentions of that

one with a sally of encomiastic verse: he left psalms of his own

composing in the manse when he feasted with a divine: he enclosed

"Holy Willie's Prayer," with an injunction to be grave, to one who

loved mirth: he sent the "Holy Fair" to one whom he invited to drink a

gill out of a mutchkin stoup, at Mauchline market; and on accidentally

meeting with Lord Daer, he immediately commemorated the event in a

sally of verse, of a strain more free and yet as flattering as ever

flowed from the lips of a court bard. While musing over the names of

those on whom fortune had smiled, yet who had neglected to smile on

him, he remembered that he had met Miss Alexander, a young beauty of

the west, in the walks of Ballochmyle; and he recorded the impression

which this fair vision made on him in a song of unequalled elegance

and melody. He had met her in the woods in July, on the 18th of

November he sent her the song, and reminded her of the circumstance

from which it arose, in a letter which it is evident he had laboured

to render polished and complimentary. The young lady took no notice of

either the song or the poet, though willing, it is said, to hear of

both now:--this seems to have been the last attempt he made on the

taste or the sympathies of the gentry of his native district: for on

the very day following we find him busy in making arrangements for his

departure to Jamaica.

 

For this step Burns had more than sufficient reasons: the profits of

his volume amounted to little more than enough to waft him across the

Atlantic: Wee Johnnie, though the edition was all sold, refused to

risk another on speculation: his friends, both Ballantynes and

Parkers, volunteered to relieve the printer's anxieties, but the poet

declined their bounty, and gloomily indented himself in a ship about

to sail from Greenock, and called on his muse to take farewell of

Caledonia, in the last song he ever expected to measure in his native

land. That fine lyric, beginning "The gloomy night is gathering fast,"

was the offspring of these moments of regret and sorrow. His feelings

were not expressed in song alone: he remembered his mother and his

natural daughter, and made an assignment of all that pertained to him

at Mossgiel--and that was but little--and of all the advantage which a

cruel, unjust, and insulting law allowed in the proceeds of his poems,

for their support and behoof. This document was publicly read in the

presence of the poet, at the market-cross of Ayr, by his friend

William Chalmers, a notary public. Even this step was to Burns one of

danger: some ill-advised person had uncoupled the merciless pack of

the law at his heels, and he was obliged to shelter himself as he best

could, in woods, it is said, by day and in barns by night, till the

final hour of his departure came. That hour arrived, and his chest was

on the way to the ship, when a letter was put into his hand which

seemed to light him to brighter prospects.

 

Among the friends whom his merits had procured him was Dr. Laurie, a

district clergyman, who had taste enough to admire the deep

sensibilities as well as the humour of the poet, and the generosity to

make known both his works and his worth to the warm-hearted and

amiable Blacklock, who boldly proclaimed him a poet of the first rank,

and lamented that he was not in Edinburgh to publish another edition

of his poems. Burns was ever a man of impulse: he recalled his chest

from Greenock; he relinquished the situation he had accepted on the

estate of one Douglas; took a secret leave of his mother, and, without

an introduction to any one, and unknown personally to all, save to

Dugald Stewart, away he walked, through Glenap, to Edinburgh, full of

new hope and confiding in his genius. When he arrived, he scarcely

knew what to do: he hesitated to call on the professor; he refrained

from making himself known, as it has been supposed he did, to the

enthusiastic Blacklock; but, sitting down in an obscure lodging, he

sought out an obscure printer, recommended by a humble comrade from

Kyle, and began to negotiate for a new edition of the Poems of the

Ayrshire Ploughman. This was not the way to go about it: his barge had

well nigh been shipwrecked in the launch; and he might have lived to

regret the letter which hindered his voyage to Jamaica, had he not met

by chance in the street a gentleman of the west, of the name of

Dalzell, who introduced him to the Earl of Glencairn, a nobleman whose

classic education did not hurt his taste for Scottish poetry, and who

was not too proud to lend his helping hand to a rustic stranger of

such merit as Burns. Cunningham carried him to Creech, then the Murray

of Edinburgh, a shrewd man of business, who opened the poet's eyes to

his true interests: the first proposals, then all but issued, were put

in the fire, and new ones printed and diffused over the island. The

subscription was headed by half the noblemen of the north: the

Caledonian Hunt, through the interest of Glencairn, took six hundred

copies: duchesses and countesses swelled the list, and such a crowding

to write down names had not been witnessed since the signing of the

solemn league and covenant.

 

While the subscription-papers were filling and the new volume printing

on a paper and in a type worthy of such high patronage, Burns remained

in Edinburgh, where, for the winter season, he was a lion, and one of an

unwonted kind. Philosophers, historians, and scholars had shaken the

elegant coteries of the city with their wit, or enlightened them with

their learning, but they were all men who had been polished by polite

letters or by intercourse with high life, and there was a sameness in

their very dress as well as address, of which peers and peeresses had

become weary. They therefore welcomed this rustic candidate for the

honour of giving wings to their hours of lassitude and weariness, with a

welcome more than common; and when his approach was announced, the

polished circle looked for the advent of a lout from the plough, in

whose uncouth manners and embarrassed address they might find matter

both for mirth and wonder. But they met with a barbarian who was not at

all barbarous: as the poet met in Lord Daer feelings and sentiments as

natural as those of a ploughman, so they met in a ploughman manners

worthy of a lord: his air was easy and unperplexed: his address was

perfectly well-bred, and elegant in its simplicity: he felt neither

eclipsed by the titled nor struck dumb before the learned and the

eloquent, but took his station with the ease and grace of one born to

it. In the society of men alone he spoke out: he spared neither his wit,

his humour, nor his sarcasm--he seemed to say to all--"I am a man, and

you are no more; and why should I not act and speak like one?"--it was

remarked, however, that he had not learnt, or did not desire, to conceal

his emotions--that he commended with more rapture than was courteous,

and contradicted with more bluntness than was accounted polite. It was

thus with him in the company of men: when woman approached, his look

altered, his eye beamed milder; all that was stern in his nature

underwent a change, and he received them with deference, but with a

consciousness that he could win their attention as he had won that of

others, who differed, indeed, from them only in the texture of their

kirtles. This natural power of rendering himself acceptable to women had

been observed and envied by Sillar, one of the dearest of his early

comrades; and it stood him in good stead now, when he was the object to

whom the Duchess of Gordon, the loveliest as well as the wittiest of

women--directed her discourse. Burns, she afterwards said, won the

attention of the Edinburgh ladies by a deferential way of address--by an

ease and natural grace of manners, as new as it was unexpected--that he

told them the stories of some of his tenderest songs or liveliest poems

in a style quite magical--enriching his little narratives, which had one

and all the merit of being short, with personal incidents of humour or

of pathos.

 

In a party, when Dr. Blair and Professor Walker were present, Burns

related the circumstances under which he had composed his melancholy

song, "The gloomy night is gathering fast," in a way even more

touching than the verses: and in the company of the ruling beauties of

the time, he hesitated not to lift the veil from some of the tenderer

parts of his own history, and give them glimpses of the romance of

rustic life. A lady of birth--one of his must willing listeners--used,

I am told, to say, that she should never forget the tale which he

related of his affection for Mary Campbell, his Highland Mary, as he

loved to call her. She was fair, he said, and affectionate, and as

guileless as she was beautiful; and beautiful he thought her in a very

high degree. The first time he saw her was during one of his musing

walks in the woods of Montgomery Castle; and the first time he spoke

to her was during the merriment of a harvest-kirn. There were others

there who admired her, but he addressed her, and had the luck to win

her regard from them all. He soon found that she was the lass whom he

had long sought, but never before found--that her good looks were

surpassed by her good sense; and her good sense was equalled by her

discretion and modesty. He met her frequently: she saw by his looks

that he was sincere; she put full trust in his love, and used to

wander with him among the green knowes and stream-banks till the sun

went down and the moon rose, talking, dreaming of love and the golden

days which awaited them. He was poor, and she had only her half-year's

fee, for she was in the condition of a servant; but thoughts of gear

never darkened their dream: they resolved to wed, and exchanged vows

of constancy and love. They plighted their vows on the Sabbath to

render them more sacred--they made them by a burn, where they had

courted, that open nature might be a witness--they made them over an

open Bible, to show that they thought of God in this mutual act--and

when they had done they both took water in their hands, and scattered

it in the air, to intimate that as the stream was pure so were their

intentions. They parted when they did this, but they parted never to

meet more: she died in a burning fever, during a visit to her

relations to prepare for her marriage; and all that he had of her was

a lock of her long bright hair, and her Bible, which she exchanged for

his.

 

Even with the tales which he related of rustic love and adventure his

own story mingled; and ladies of rank heard, for the first time, that

in all that was romantic in the passion of love, and in all that was

chivalrous in sentiment, men of distinction, both by education and

birth, were at least equalled by the peasantry of the land. They

listened with interest, and inclined their feathers beside the bard,

to hear how love went on in the west, and in no case it ran quite

smooth. Sometimes young hearts were kept asunder by the sordid

feelings of parents, who could not be persuaded to bestow their

daughter, perhaps an only one, on a wooer who could not count penny

for penny, and number cow for cow: sometimes a mother desired her

daughter to look higher than to one of her station: for her beauty and

her education entitled her to match among the lairds, rather than the

tenants; and sometimes, the devotional tastes of both father and

mother, approving of personal looks and connexions, were averse to

see a daughter bestow her hand on one, whose language in religion was

indiscreet, and whose morals were suspected. Yet, neither the

vigilance of fathers, nor the suspicious care of aunts and mothers,

could succeed in keeping those asunder whose hearts were together; but

in these meetings circumspection and invention were necessary: all

fears were to be lulled by the seeming carelessness of the lass,--all

perils were to be met and braved by the spirit of the lad. His home,

perhaps, was at a distance, and he had wild woods to come through, and

deep streams to pass, before he could see the signal-light, now shown

and now withdrawn, at her window; he had to approach with a quick eye

and a wary foot, lest a father or a brother should see, and deter him:

he had sometimes to wish for a cloud upon the moon, whose light,

welcome to him on his way in the distance, was likely to betray him

when near; and he not unfrequently reckoned a wild night of wind and

rain as a blessing, since it helped to conceal his coming, and proved

to his mistress that he was ready to brave all for her sake. Of rivals

met and baffled; of half-willing and half-unconsenting maidens,

persuaded and won; of the light-hearted and the careless becoming

affectionate and tender; and the coy, the proud, and the satiric being

gained by "persuasive words, and more persuasive sighs," as dames had

been gained of old, he had tales enow. The ladies listened, and smiled

at the tender narratives of the poet.

 

Of his appearance among the sons as well as the daughters of men, we

have the account of Dugald Stewart. "Burns," says the philosopher,

"came to Edinburgh early in the winter: the attentions which he

received from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as

would have turned any head but his own. He retained the same

simplicity of manners and appearance which had struck me so forcibly

when I first saw him in the country: his dress was suited to his

station; plain and unpretending, with sufficient attention to

neatness: he always wore boots, and, when on more than usual ceremony,

buckskin breeches. His manners were manly, simple, and independent;

strongly expressive of conscious genius and worth, but without any

indication of forwardness, arrogance, or vanity. He took his share in

conversation, but not more than belonged to him, and listened with

apparent deference on subjects where his want of education deprived

him of the means of information. If there had been a little more of

gentleness and accommodation in his temper, he would have been still

more interesting; but he had been accustomed to give law in the circle

of his ordinary acquaintance, and his dread of anything approaching to

meanness or servility, rendered his manner somewhat decided and hard.

Nothing perhaps was more remarkable among his various attainments,

than the fluency and precision and originality of language, when he

spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn

of __EXPRESSION__, and avoided more successfully than most Scotsmen, the

peculiarities of Scottish phraseology. From his conversation I should

have pronounced him to have been fitted to excel in whatever walk of

ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities. He was passionately

fond of the beauties of nature, and I recollect he once told me, when

I was admiring a distant prospect in one of our morning walks, that

the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind,

which none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the

happiness and worth which cottages contained."

 

Such was the impression which Burns made at first on the fair, the

titled, and the learned of Edinburgh; an impression which, though

lessened by intimacy and closer examination on the part of the men,

remained unimpaired, on that of the softer sex, till his dying-day.

His company, during the season of balls and festivities, continued to

be courted by all who desired to be reckoned gay or polite. Cards of

invitation fell thick on him; he was not more welcome to the plumed

and jewelled groups, whom her fascinating Grace of Gordon gathered

about her, than he was to the grave divines and polished scholars, who

assembled in the rooms of Stewart, or Blair, or Robertson. The classic

socialities of Tytler, afterwards Lord Woodhouslee, or the elaborate

supper-tables of the whimsical Monboddo, whose guests imagined they

were entertained in the manner of Lucullus or of Cicero, were not

complete without the presence of the ploughman of Kyle; and the

feelings of the rustic poet, facing such companies, though of surprise

and delight at first, gradually subsided, he said, as he discerned,

that man differed from man only in the polish, and not in the grain.

But Edinburgh offered tables and entertainers of a less orderly and

staid character than those I have named--where the glass circulated

with greater rapidity; where the wit flowed more freely; and where

there were neither highbred ladies to charm conversation within the

bounds of modesty, nor serious philosophers, nor grave divines, to set

a limit to the license of speech, or the hours of enjoyment. To these

companions--and these were all of the better classes, the levities of

the rustic poet's wit and humour were as welcome us were the tenderest

of his narratives to the accomplished Duchess of Gordon and the

beautiful Miss Burnet of Monboddo; they raised a social roar not at

all classic, and demanded and provoked his sallies of wild humour, or

indecorous mirth, with as much delight as he had witnessed among the

lads of Kyle, when, at mill or forge, his humorous sallies abounded as

the ale flowed. In these enjoyments the rough, but learned William

Nicol, and the young and amiable Robert Ainslie shared: the name of

the poet was coupled with those of profane wits, free livers, and that class of half-idle gentlemen who hang about the courts of law, or for a season or two wear the livery of Mars, and handle cold iron.