Pride and Passion: Robert Burns, 1759-1796

WOMEN

Burns was twenty-six before he ever entered the home of a woman sufficiently well-to-do to have carpets on her floors. Though the last ten years of his life included many friendships with ladies, his basic ideas of the other sex were the fruit of the peasant environment he was reared in. His sentiment and chivalry were literary by-products; underneath them was always the crude realism of the Ayrshire countryfolk. In moments of stress it was only too apt to come to the surface.

The only subtlety the peasant women of Burns’s youth could claim was that native to every daughter of Eve. Schooling was too expensive to waste on girls. The majority, like Agnes Broun, could not write their own names; many could not even spell out the Scriptures or the Psalms of David in metre. Their fathers, their husbands, or the minister could read the Bible to them, and thus they could obtain the light of salvation at second hand. But this is not to say that they knew no literature. In fact it was only among an illiterate population that the songs and ballads of popular tradition were living realities. James Hogg’s mother spoke for her whole class when she told Sir Walter Scott that he had killed her ballads by writing them down. Learning to read destroyed both the sense of reality in the traditional literature and the retentiveness of memory which made its transmission possible. Had Betty Davidson, Agnes Broun, and Jean Armour been literate women they would not have furnished Burns with the mass of traditional literature he owed to them.

A girl’s real education in rural Scotland was obtained in the kitchen, the dairy, and the fields. Almost as soon as they could walk boys and girls alike helped with the sheep and cattle and in all the work of seedtime and harvest. As they grew older the girls were trained more and more for the indoor duties of which cooking was the smallest part. Most of the clothing was made at home, from the carding and spinning of the wool and flax to the sewing of the finished webs into garments. Itinerant tailors made the Sunday clothes of the men; all the rest was the work of the women of the household. Add to these activities the manifold duties of kitchen and dairy and poultry yard and no peasant woman could have reason to complain of lack of occupation. At harvest time men and women alike turned out into the fields, the men to mow with scythe and sickle, the women and boys to bind and stack the sheaves and to glean after the reapers.

It was from these barefooted illiterate lasses that Burns got his first experiences in love and his whole simple theory of the relations of the sexes. Woman as the peasant knows her, sharing his daily toil, is not a superior being set apart for adoration. There is no mystery about her except the endless mystery of sex. There may be companionship and a more intimate sharing of the man’s interests than women of higher rank attain. But the peasant woman cannot expect and does not get the graces of deference. Burns’s attitude towards the girls of his class differed in one respect only from that of any other possessive young male. He was a poet, and from the very beginning poetry and sex were inextricably mingled. When as a fifteen-year-old boy he helped Nellie Kilpatrick to bind sheaves in the harvest field, and experienced the primitive coquetry which sought his help in extracting nettle and thistle stings from her fingers, his first impulses were those of any adolescent just becoming conscious of desire. But the second impulse was different. Unable to possess Nellie, he made a song about her.

As we have seen, courtship among the peasantry was no private matter. Not only did everyone know who was courting whom, but the aid of interested friends was habitually enlisted in arranging trysts. While still in his teens Burns displayed a command of the written word—insufferably turgid though the few surviving specimens of his early love-letters seem to us—which made him the chosen secretary for his less fluent cronies. He himself fell into love and out again with ease and frequency. But his early sweethearts are, like Nellie Kilpatrick, names and nothing more. Burns’s statement that his relations with women were entirely innocent until after he met Richard Brown in 1781 is countered by Brown’s charge that he was already fully initiated. As Henley says, it is one man’s word against another’s; since Burns was not in the habit of lying about his own conduct we may believe him. Where, when, or with whom his initiation took place is both uncertain and unimportant. His own assertion that he ‘commenced a fornicator’ with Betty Paton is subject to the discount always to be charged against poetical versions of prose facts. The certainty is that the years following his return from Irvine were loaded with emotional tension by three women—Elizabeth Paton, Mary Campbell, and Jean Armour. Of the three the one who has received the most attention probably deserves the least.

No glamour of romance shields Betty Paton. A servant of his mother’s at Lochlie and Mossgiel, she succumbed willingly enough to the advances of the young farmer whom his father’s death had just released from tutelage, and in due course bore him a daughter in the spring of 1785. According to Gilbert Burns, Robert wanted to marry her, but was dissuaded by his family, who feared that her coarseness would soon disgust him. Perhaps so, but the only contemporary letter does not include matrimonial desire among the feelings it hints at. After the first embarrassment wore off and he and Betty had duly stood thrice before the congregation of Mauchline Kirk to be admonished for their sin, Burns brazened it out to the scandal of his stricter neighbours, and Betty accepted it resignedly, knowing that such accidents would happen and that they need not necessarily impair her future career. Part of her resignation, however, may have been conviction that Robert Burns had insufficient prospects to make marriage worth fighting for. In the fall of 1786, when the Kilmarnock Poems had supplied her erstwhile lover with a little ready cash, Betty promptly demanded maintenance for herself and her child. In settling the claim Burns apparently had to pay over rather more than half his profits, besides legally binding himself for the complete support and education of his daughter. When on December 1, 1786, she signed with her mark the legal discharge of her claim, Betty Paton disappeared from Burns’s life. She was a merry lass; her lover had paid for his fun; the account was closed—except for the black-eyed little girl being reared by a long-suffering grandmother at Mossgiel.

Jean Armour’s case was different, though it commenced, like Betty’s, in purely physical attraction. To begin with, the status of the girls was different, even though both were red-knuckled, barefooted country lasses. Betty was merely a farm servant whose family ties, whatever they were, were already broken. Jean was the eighteen-year-old daughter of James Armour, a well-to-do master-mason and contractor in Mauchline. She was educated to the extent of being able to read the Bible and write her own name. The story of her first meeting with Burns is probably legend, yet in spirit the anecdote is at least partly true. Burns at a village dance, embarrassed by a too-faithful collie which followed him about the floor, remarked as he expelled the animal that he wished he could find a lass to love him as well as his dog did. Whether or not Jean actually asked him a few days later, when he found her bleaching linen on the green, if he had yet found such a lass, the fact was that he had. From that moment until his death Jean lavished upon him a docile and much-enduring devotion which leaves nothing derogatory in the comparison. She was playing with fire and must have known it. The scandal of Betty Paton was still fresh; Burns was a notorious man, glorying in the reputation of village Lothario and writing verses to warn the Mauchline belles how devastating he was. Experience had convinced him that all women are sisters under the skin—a dangerous half-truth which made trouble for him when he met women of another social level. They may all be sisters under the skin, but not on it or outside it. The fascination exerted so successfully over girls of his own class was in fact disastrous training for subsequent encounters with ladies. A lady may yield to a lover like any peasant lass, but she expects some finesse in his approach. But in the summer and autumn of 1785 Burns seemed as likely to enter Edinburgh drawing-rooms as to enter Parliament. He was merely an unsuccessful tenant-farmer with a dangerous talent for writing satirical verse and a dangerous light in his eye when an attractive young woman was in sight.

Between the tradition of his first meeting with Jean in 1785 and the beginning of surviving references to the affair in February, 1786, its history is a blank. On the surface Jean’s experience merely repeated Betty Paton’s. She surrendered to Burns and in due course endured the consequences. Yet on Burns’s side the cases were not alike. However brazenly he may have begun his courtship he soon found that Jean roused deeper emotions than Betty ever had. His first extant reference to the affair, apart from verses in praise of Jean’s charms, was on February 17th, 1786, when he told John Richmond—who after a similar scrape had fled to Edinburgh—that he had important news ‘not of the most agreable’ with respect to himself. In other words, Jean had told him she was pregnant. Entirely on his own initiative Burns undertook to do the right thing he had successfully avoided, or been dissuaded from, doing for Betty Paton. Sometime in March he gave Jean, if not marriage lines, at least some written acknowledgement that she was or would be his wife. That he acted in a certain glow of self-righteousness is a fair deduction from the violence of his subsequent reaction. Rab Mossgiel, the village Lothario, had behaved like a man of honour and expected due recognition of his conduct.

The recognition he got was humiliating in the extreme. The details can be reconstructed only by inference from the result. Apparently Jean’s parents, suspecting her condition, began to question her. She produced Burns’s written pledge. A domestic storm burst, not so much because Jean was to bear Burns’s child as because he expected Jean to bear his name. To James Armour an illegitimate grandchild was preferable to such a son-in-law as Robert Burns. Jean meekly surrendered her lines to her father—throughout her life she was usually passive in the hands of male authority—and Armour carried the document to Burns’s patron and friend, Robert Aiken, whom he persuaded to cut out the names. Not the least extraordinary element in the affair is the apparent belief of a successful lawyer that a contract could be voided merely by mutilating the written evidence. Armour’s desire publicly to humiliate Burns was greater than his desire to protect his daughter. He succeeded admirably. In the same letter in which the poet told Gavin Hamilton that the document was mutilated he declared he ‘had not a hope or even a wish to make her mine after her damnable conduct’, yet amid his execrations he paused to invoke a blessing on his ‘poor once-dear misguided girl’. The letter was the first of a series of denunciations and repudiations of Jean much too loud and too shrill to be convincing. They suggest that Burns had to talk at the top of his voice to maintain the degree of indifference which he felt self-respect called for.

Perhaps nothing in Burns’s whole life more completely demonstrates the impossibility of judging him and the society in which he was reared by the standards of nineteenth-century middle-class respectability. When James Armour learned that the subscription for the Kilmarnock Poems was a success he showed that, though unwilling that his daughter should bear Burns’s name, he was quite willing she should share Burns’s money. Accordingly he sued out a writ in meditatione fugae to require Burns to guarantee the support of Jean’s expected child. The news reached Burns, probably from Jean herself, and he acted promptly. By formal deed of assignment he conveyed to Gilbert not only his share in Mossgiel, but also the entire proceeds of his forthcoming poems in consideration of Gilbert’s undertaking to provide for Betty Paton’s child. Burns had checkmated James Armour, and so doing had almost evened the honours for ungenerous conduct. By nineteenth-century standards his conduct was caddish, but by the same standards Armour could have done only one of two things—either expel his daughter from his home, or protect her technical good name by insisting upon marriage however distasteful the prospective son-in-law was. But even by his own standards Burns was acting ignobly. The man who had written

and who less than six weeks after the deed of assignment eloquently reproached John Richmond for neglecting his late mistress and future wife and her baby daughter, was allowing spite to degrade him below the standards of the class to which he belonged by birth, and much further below the standards he had consciously set for himself. This was not acting according to the example of Harley the Man of Feeling. If the episode stood by itself it might be easier to condone. Unfortunately it is merely the first conspicuous incident in a series which includes his remarks about Jean to Clarinda and Bob Ainslie, his neglect of Jenny Clow, his attack upon dead Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive, and his lampoons of Maria Riddell, and which justifies Henley’s phrase that such things ‘roused the cad’ in Burns. Where women were concerned, it was always too easy for him to drop the thin cloak of acquired culture and revert to his peasanthood.

Alongside the Armour quarrel runs the mystery of Mary Campbell. Burns himself began the mystery by his curiously veiled allusions to the affair, but the real work of obfuscation was done by biographers who erected upon exiguous foundations of fact an ornate superstructure of legend.

The exact date at which Burns composed the ‘Jolly Beggars’ is uncertain—if it was really written after a slumming frolic with John Richmond it must have been in 1785—but the closing episode is either autobiography or prophecy. The Bard, whose sentiments in the closing chorus are definitely Burns’s own, is depicted with a doxy upon either arm. After the stormy spring and summer of 1786 Burns confessed to Robert Aiken that he had plunged into all sorts of riot, Mason meetings, and dissipation, to distract his mind from the humiliation of the Armour affair. What form his dissipation took may reasonably be guessed not only from Burns’s own temperament but from human nature in general. Yet nothing about his relation with Mary Campbell is free of doubt. All that can definitely be proved is that there was a servant-lass of that name to whom Burns apparently addressed certain lyrics and to whom he certainly gave a pair of Bibles bearing peculiar inscriptions. It is useless to rehearse the endless controversy between the romantics to whom Mary Campbell was a Lily Maid of Astolat and the realists to whom she was just another girl who couldn’t say no. But a few facts must be underscored. The critical analysis of the legend made with caustic humour by Henley in 1896 and subsequently elaborated by Professor Snyder has never been rebutted nor even answered. The scripture texts Burns wrote on the fly-leaves of that Bible are such as would have been chosen by a man to whom a frightened girl was appealing for protection and who was impulsively promising it on his word of honour as a man and a Mason. That he also sang Mary’s praises as ‘Highland Lassie’ and in another lyric asked—for poetic effect at least—if she would go to the Indies with him means little, if anything. The enthusiasts prefer to forget that during the same summer Burns said farewell to Eliza Miller in a lyric quite as fervid as any of those addressed to Mary.

Out of the mass of legend and conjecture the only solid facts which emerge are that during this spring of 1786 Burns was having some sort of a love affair with Mary; that she left Ayrshire in May, and that she died in the early autumn. Burns may have turned to her for consolation after the breach with Jean; the affairs may have been simultaneous. Most biographers incline to the sequel theory on the naïve assumption that love affairs, unlike electric batteries, are always mounted in series and never in parallel. In view of the social attitude of the Ayrshire peasantry the question of whether or not Mary was technically chaste is both metaphysical and irrelevant. Burns’s attitude toward the other sex was direct; perhaps the strongest argument for Mary’s chastity would be the complete lack of reference to her in his contemporary letters, were it not for his subsequent description of her as ‘as charming a girl as ever blessed a man with generous love’. Burns ordinarily meant such expressions in the most literal sense. Despite the evidence in the Bibles that he had tried again to do the right thing it is hard to believe that in retrospect Mary would have touched him any more deeply than Jenny Clow or Anne Park later did had it not been for her untimely death. She certainly meant little in May and June of 1786. In the same month in which he gave her the Bible he composed the long and bawdy ‘Court of Equity’; throughout the summer his letters to his intimates mingle execration, devotion, and regret for Jean Armour in precisely the same tones he had used in April. A man who had really found an adequate new love might be supposed to speak of the old one as Burns had spoken of Peggy Thomson in 1784. Resentment of the Armours’ conduct might explain the execration, but hardly the regret and certainly not the devotion. If Burns really intended to make a new start in Jamaica with Mary Campbell, it is strange indeed that he never hinted of it to his friends—unless we accept the tradition, reported at second hand from John Richmond, that Mary was a light-skirts whose character Richmond and some other friends exposed to the poet. In that case, he would have had good reason for silence.

When in October he summed up his situation in a long letter to Robert Aiken it was still Jean who was the cause of his secret wretchedness and who was the source of ‘the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse’. The sole passage in the letter which Snyder thought might apply to Mary—‘I have seen something of the storm of mischief thickening over my folly-devoted head’—may now be interpreted as referring instead to the disconcerting reappearance of Betty Paton as a claimant for support. The sole evidence surviving from 1786, apart from Burns’s lyrics, is his sister’s story, told many years after his death, that one day in October he received a letter which he read with a look of agony and then crushed into his pocket as he silently left the house. Connecting this story with Burns’s later statement that ‘a malignant fever hurried my dear girl to her grave before I could even hear of her illness’, biographers have assumed that the painful letter bore the news of Mary’s death. But this, even granting perfect reliability to Isabella Begg’s memory, is pure assumption. Burns’s sole references to her were written from three to five years after the supposed event. With one exception they were intended for the mystification rather than the enlightenment of Robert Riddell and George Thomson. That exception is the composition of ‘Thou Lingering Star’ and the letter to Mrs. Dunlop which accompanied it—both of them written in a neurotic state close to complete nervous breakdown. The Highland Mary we know is the creation of biographers, and should be suffered to abide in the Never-Never Land of romance. The truth about the Burns of flesh and blood had better be sought in his relations with flesh and blood women.

In these relations there were three main degrees. The foremost group consists of women who profoundly stirred him, and on whom for a time at least he concentrated his intellect and his affections as well as his desires. In this group belong Jean Armour, Margaret Chalmers, Clarinda, and probably Maria Riddell. Next come the women who engaged his passing fancy, and for whom he felt some tenderness, but who did not influence him deeply or long. Among these are Betty Paton, Anne Park, Jean Lorimer, and Jessie Lewars. A woman who appealed to Burns on either of these bases need not have been his mistress; in fact, only three of those named ever yielded to him. But below these was a third group, represented by Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow, who were mistresses and nothing more—the mere conveniences of the moment. These last never roused even a momentary spark of poetry in their lover. Judged purely on the basis of literary by-product, Mary Campbell belongs in the second group, but not in the first. Even her most ardent champion might hesitate to assert that any lyric addressed to her is the equal of ‘Ae fond kiss’ or ‘Of a’ the airts’. Jessie Lewars and Jean Lorimer both inspired better songs than Mary ever did.

But Burns’s tenderness, even for the women who meant most to him, was often of a peculiar sort. Though he told Deborah Davies that ‘Woman is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of precedency among them, but let them all be sacred’, his practice was more accurately summarized in what he said about love in confiding to George Thomson his admiration for Jean Lorimer:

One fears that Burns remained on these chivalrous heights only when the woman was unattainable; should she yield to him, she would too readily take her place among ‘the herd of the Sex’. Certainly he freely discussed his loves not only among his male friends but with a patroness like Mrs. Dunlop. When, for instance, after his conquering hero’s return to Mauchline in June, 1787, the Armours bade him welcome and Jean succumbed once more, he lost no time in reporting the victory to Smith and Ainslie. To put it briefly, beneath the veneer of sentiment, beneath even the poetic response, Burns’s attitude towards women of his own age was the elemental possessiveness which regards sex primarily as a ribald jest. His sincerest tenderness belonged to no woman as deeply as it did to his children, however or wherever begotten.

Burns never revealed more truly his own feelings than in the ‘Poet’s Welcome to his Bastart Wean’ which hailed the birth of his eldest child, Betty Paton’s daughter. Its mixture of bawdry with affection, of rollicking defiance of the unco guid with exultant pride in paternity, may distress the tender-minded who prefer not to admit the existence in parental relations of even a sublimated carnality, but it is the very essence of Burns himself. His plainest expressions of his love for his children occur not in letters to women but in letters to his most intimate male friends, and often amid flagrant ribaldry. It was not to Mrs. Dunlop that he wrote that Jean’s first twins ‘awakened a thousand feelings that thrill, some with tender pleasure and some with foreboding anguish, thro’ my soul’; it was to Robert Muir, companion of his revels and recipient of broad jests. Robert Aiken was told that the feelings of a father outweighed in Burns all the sound reasoning and all the bitter memories that joined in urging him to carry through the Jamaica project. ‘God bless them, poor little dears!’ he exclaimed to John Richmond on reporting the birth of the twins. Such remarks to men before whom he had no motive for acting a part, are more convincing proof of real feelings than are the dissertations, garnished with quotations from James Thomson’s dramas, on parental anxieties in his letters to Mrs. Dunlop.

Especially notable is the letter he wrote to Bob Ainslie on August 1, 1787, in response to the latter’s announcement of the birth of an illegitimate son. Beginning, ‘Give you joy, give you joy, my dear brother!’ he goes on to say that he has ‘double health and spirits at the news’, and to welcome Ainslie to ‘the society, the venerable Society of Fathers’. There follow eight lines of the metrical version of Psalm 127, obviously quoted with as much sincerity as when he later used it, in quite different context, in writing to John M’Auley. He continues, ‘My ailing child is got better, and the Mother is certainly in for it again, and Peggy [Meg Cameron] will bring me a half Highlandman’, and announces his intention of getting a farm, bringing them all up in fear of the Lord and of a good oak stick, and of being the happiest man alive. Then the letter shifts to snatches of bawdy song, some quoted, others apparently impromptu. This primitive joy in paternity, this exultation over the mere fact of birth, whether the child was his own or another’s, was part of his heritage from the Scottish soil. The same spirit shows three years later in his reply to Mrs. Dunlop’s news that her widowed daughter Mrs. Henri had borne a posthumous son:

Nor did his paternal emotions dissipate themselves in rejoicings over birth. Testimony abounds of his devotion to his children, his concern over their proper education, his anxiety for their futures. James Gray on evening visits in Dumfries found him explaining poetry to the eldest boy and hearing him recite his lessons; Maria Riddell was impressed by his constant devotion to the children’s welfare. But towards their mothers, once the fancy had passed, he was indifferent. ‘I am very sorry for it, but what is done is done’, he said of Meg Cameron, and though Clarinda’s rebuke stung him into something like remorse for his treatment of Jenny Clow, even there his last thought was for his son: ‘I would have taken my boy from her long ago, but she would never consent.’ The one possible exception to his generalization was Jean Armour, but Jean’s later history belongs elsewhere, beside Clarinda’s.

In brief, Burns’s experience among women up to his departure for Edinburgh had made him the ‘magerfu’’ man Sentimental Tommy had longed to be. His love-making might involve him in tangles which he was neither astute nor callous enough to avoid, but he had found his attraction enhanced by his reputation as a dangerous man. He had learned the value of aggressiveness; he had not learned finesse. When he met ladies his lack sooner or later became painfully evident.

Among women of the upper classes he was at his best in association with those whose interest was motherly rather than actually or potentially amorous. Before going to Edinburgh he had charmed middle-aged Mrs. Stewart of Stair as well as mature Mrs. Lawrie, wife of the minister of Loudoun, and had begun with Mrs. Dunlop a correspondence which ended only on his deathbed. In its progress this friendship reveals much of what was best in his relations with women; in the estrangement which interrupted it it reveals also his shortcomings. Since, moreover, it is the only one of his friendships in which both sides of the correspondence have been preserved, no guess-work is required in tracing its rise and decline.

Frances Anna Wallace Dunlop belonged by both birth and marriage to the old landed gentry of Scotland, and claimed collateral descent from Sir William Wallace. In the autumn of 1786 her mind was ‘in a state which, had it long continued my only refuge would inevitably have been a mad-house or a grave; nothing interested or amused me; all around me served to probe a wound whose recent stab was mortal to my peace, and had already ruined my health and benumbed my senses.’ Grief at her husband’s recent death had something to do with it, but the chief wound was her eldest son’s extravagance and marital scandals. About the beginning of November a copy of the Kilmarnock Poems reached her and her reading of them—significantly enough it was ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and other poems based on the genteel tradition of eighteenth-century poetry that won her admiration—roused her to fresh interest in life. ‘The poignancy of your expression’, as she put it, ‘soothed my soul.’ To one reading her letters without reference to her age she often sounds like a decrepit and almost dying woman. Actually when she began writing to Burns she was only fifty-six, and she outlived him by nineteen years. She opened the correspondence with an order for six copies of the poems; the flattered poet could scrape together only five, which he dispatched with a complimentary letter that included the news that he was planning a second edition in Edinburgh. Mrs. Dunlop immediately elected herself one of his chief advisers, and among other things suggested that in revising his poems he should avoid describing her great ancestor as ‘unhappy Wallace’ and should make the Twa Dogs sit down more decorously. Later she offered the two most inept of all the recorded plans for the poet’s future. In February, 1787, she proposed that he should use the proceeds of his Edinburgh subscription to buy a commission in the army. The man who wrote ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ and whose dislike for ‘the lobster-coated puppies’ of the army more than once got him into hot water would have cut a strange figure in any officers’ mess. On April 1, 1789, she suggested his applying for the newly established Professorship of Agriculture at Edinburgh University. The self-taught peasant would have cut a still stranger figure as the colleague of Robertson, Cullen, and Blair.

The history of the first few months of his friendship with Mrs. Dunlop reveals how far Burns was from understanding the finer points of etiquette. To begin with he ignored her suggestions for altering his poems. True, he could do nothing else. Her advice was merely typical of what genteel Scotland thought about his work. To accept all emendations would have reduced his poems to namby-pamby; to accept some and reject others would have doubly offended those whose criticism he ignored. But he should have explained this to Mrs. Dunlop, and did not. Her vexation at the discovery was intensified by an innocent blunder he made in arranging for the delivery of copies she had ordered for her stepmother, the dowager Lady Wallace of Craigie. The copies went instead to the estranged wife of her eldest son, also a Lady Wallace but regarded by her mother-in-law as the worst blemish the family tree had ever suffered.

Their relations were first put on a really cordial basis when Burns visited her at Dunlop House in July, 1787. Annoyance at his social blunders evaporated before the charm of his personality, and thereafter the correspondence on both sides took a new tone of affection and esteem. Her interest in Burns was generous and motherly. She plied him with good advice, which he generally ignored, and frequently added substantial help with both money and influence. Towards her Burns seems to have felt as many a man does towards his mother—she bored him but he loved her. She often accused him, no doubt justly, of not reading her letters. They were long, tedious, and wholly unpunctuated; he probably glanced over them when they arrived and then laid them aside for more careful reading at a leisure hour which never came. But though he seldom answered her questions he took her unreservedly into his confidence—or almost unreservedly. He never did more than hint about Clarinda, but he told her everything about Jean. In fact he must have told almost too much; it is hard otherwise to explain his embarrassment over breaking the news that he had finally married the girl who had borne him ‘twice twins in seventeen months’.

By the beginning of 1788 the friendship was so firmly established as to survive a most humiliating incident. When he visited Dunlop House on his way back from Edinburgh in February his reception was warm and flattering. Mrs. Dunlop’s unmarried daughters were agog with admiration. Miss Rachel was hard at work on a painting of his muse, Coila, as to whose appearance she sought the poet’s expert advice. Miss Keith discussed poetry with him and revealed the somewhat surprising fact that she had never read Gray. Before he left he had promised to lend the ladies his copy of Spenser, a recent gift from William Dunbar of Edinburgh. When a few days later he fulfilled his promise he added to the parcel a copy of Gray as a present for Miss Keith, only to learn that a plebeian poet must not presume too far. Mrs. Dunlop replied that she did not allow her daughter to receive presents from men who were not members of her own family, and proposed either to return the whole book or at most to permit Miss Keith to tear out the pages containing the poems she liked best. That Burns continued in friendship with Mrs. Dunlop after this rebuff is eloquent proof of the esteem in which he held her; he had lampooned others of the gentry for less.

Not that this was the only time when Mrs. Dunlop made him conscious of the difference in their ranks. Her occasional gift of a five-pound note, though usually tactfully designated as for some special purpose or occasion, always hurt his pride—the more so because he could not deny that he needed the money. He silently drew the line, however, when she proposed, in one of those fits of economy which sometimes afflict the well-to-do, that he help to sell some decorative fringe which she had been manufacturing. Over this as over others of his sins of omission she displayed an irritability more like a schoolgirl’s than a grandmother’s; most schoolgirlish in its evanescence. A thorough scolding which sounded like a total breach of relations would be countered by some new poems or new compliments from Burns, and her next letter would contain a five-pound note for the latest baby.

Though as Burns became more heavily burdened with labour and responsibility his letters grew shorter and fewer than at the peak of the correspondence during the summer of 1788, no serious rift appeared until December, 1792. When it came it was the result of Burns’s pride working in combination with his want of tact. Among the servants on Mrs. Dunlop’s estate was a milkmaid named Jenny Little, whom Burns’s success had inspired to burst into rime. Burns had already endured a good deal of her output, both from manuscripts sent to him by Mrs. Dunlop and from a pilgrimage of adoration which Jenny had made to Ellisland in 1790—an unsuccessful pilgrimage, for she had found the poet laid up with a broken arm and in no mood for entertaining an aspiring poetess. When Burns reached Dunlop in 1792 he found his patroness’s interest in her protégée still unshaken. With her assistance Jenny had recently printed her poems, and Mrs. Dunlop produced the volume with the request that Burns give his opinion of certain of the verses which she pointed out. He said, ‘Do I have to read all those?’ in a tone which she afterwards described as the equivalent of a slap in the face.

It was supreme tactlessness. Burns was bored and showed it. A more politic man would have waded through the verses however much his jaw might ache with suppressed yawns. But boredom was not the worst aspect of the incident from Burns’s point of view: his pride was wounded. Of all his patrons in the upper ranks of society Mrs. Dunlop alone had kept up her interest in him and had appeared to treat him as an equal. Now she unconsciously revealed that she saw no essential difference between his writing and Jenny Little’s. To her he was after all merely a peasant poet with the accent on the adjective; the difference between him and Jenny Little was a difference in degree and not in kind. Both wrote in dialect; she failed to see that one wrote Scots poetry and the other Scots twaddle.

The incident illustrates once more what Maria Riddell meant when she described Burns as devoid in great measure of refinement and social graces. The abrupt and masterful manner, successful with the girls of his own original class, sooner or later annoyed other ladies besides the Duchess of Gordon. Mrs. Dunlop, however, did not allow her vexation to cause an immediate coolness; she contented herself with a lengthy silence followed by an explanation of her reasons for being offended. Yet when the real break came two years later Burns’s unbridled tongue and pen were again at fault. Mrs. Dunlop heartily disapproved of his sympathy with the French Revolution, and had warned him more than once to drop the subject in his letters. Inasmuch as four of her sons and one grandson were or had been in the army and two of her daughters were married to French royalist refugees, Burns should have known that her sympathies would be Tory. Yet in face of her warnings he wrote in January, 1794, the most outspoken of all his political remarks, describing Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as a perjured blockhead and an unprincipled prostitute who had met their deserved fate at the hangman’s hands, and adding a guarded hope that revolutionary principles might have more scope in England. This time Mrs. Dunlop broke off the correspondence. Though Burns made two attempts during the next year to reopen it, she maintained dogged silence until his pathetic letter of farewell, written on his deathbed, at last broke down her reserve. Her letter of reconciliation was almost the last message which reached him before his death. For a century charitable biographers conjectured that the estrangement must have been due to the lady’s hearing reports that Burns was living an evil life in Dumfries. The recovery of the complete text of his letter of January, 1794, revealed the simple truth that the breach resulted from nothing more serious than a failure in tact. There, as always, his trouble came because he had not taken heed to his ways, that he offend not with his tongue.

The same trouble underlay his relations with other women of a rank above his own—Margaret Chalmers, Agnes M’Lehose, and Maria Riddell, though in different ways and different degrees. With Margaret Chalmers, indeed, he maintained for a couple of years the nearest approach he ever made to a non-flirtatious friendship with a woman of his own age, but of the three just named this clever daughter of a gentleman farmer in Ayrshire was the least removed in station from himself. Unfortunately, only Burns’s side of the correspondence survives, and that in fragments. Apparently it began, as usual, with love-making, but when Margaret gently put a stop to that—probably by telling Burns that she was already engaged to Lewis Hay, whom she married in 1788—their relation ripened into a genuine friendship which produced what Cromek rightly called some of the best letters Burns ever wrote. The poet took her unreservedly into his confidence about his troubles with Creech and his anxiety over his future, so that his three or four letters to her during the height of his correspondence with Clarinda come like a breath of bleak but pure air in that hothouse atmosphere. But the friendship ended, apparently through Burns’s neglect. Two years after her marriage he sent regards to her through another friend, and called himself a wretch for not writing her, but seemingly he could not write when he felt that his confidences might be shared with her husband. An estranged husband would not have mattered, as his flirtation with Agnes M’Lehose proved.

The Clarinda episode has more prominence in most accounts of Burns than it deserves. In its beginning and growth it was in fact quite untypical of the man—his one intensive effort to act a part not natural to him. Its development in this way was mainly the result of the accident which threw him back on letter-writing instead of speech in conducting his suit. Agnes M’Lehose when Burns met her was a plump young matron about his own age. Born Agnes Craig of Glasgow and a relative of one of the Lords of Session, she had married in romantic haste at the age of seventeen a young lawyer named James M’Lehose, and when Burns met her had already had eleven years of leisure to repent. Her husband, after abusing and neglecting her and getting into debt and disgrace, had at last been exiled by indignant relatives to Jamaica—that tropical refuge for Britons who had made their native climate too hot for them. His wife, trying to rear three sickly children on a microscopic annuity, had turned for consolation to literature and religion. In the latter she had espoused under the dynamic preaching of the Rev. John Kemp the strictest tenets of Calvinism; in the former she had familiarized herself with the most elegant authors of the day and had taken to versifying occasionally with the fluency and inaccuracy prevalent among women poets prior to Christina Rossetti and Emily Brontë. Like most of Edinburgh in 1787 she had been eager to meet Burns. When at last she did so at a tea-party given by her friend, Miss Erskine Nimmo, she and Burns became so visibly absorbed in each other as to rouse the amusement of the other guests. The poet’s experiences hitherto with young women of the upper classes had been disappointing. They were polite and attentive, but reserved. Here at last was an indubitable lady, and a young and attractive one at that, who displayed something like the enthusiastic attention he had been accustomed to receive from the belles of Mauchline. Before the tea was over Burns had accepted Mrs. M’Lehose’s invitation to a party of her own. If ever a woman threw herself at a man’s head Agnes M’Lehose did, and Burns was not the man to refuse such a challenge. A letter to Richard Brown in the early days of his infatuation leaves no doubt that he thought he had made a conquest; but he had reckoned without Clarinda’s Calvinism and her social traditions.

The affair might have spent itself in a passing flirtation had not chance, in the form of a drunken driver who overturned a coach and dislocated the poet’s knee, confined him to his room for several weeks. His note explaining and deploring his inability to attend the tea-party was answered by one offering sympathy and regret. Burns and Mrs. M’Lehose both wielded free-flowing pens; their correspondence rapidly gained momentum and fervour. By the third exchange of letters she felt it her duty to remind him that she was a married woman. The result may or may not have been what she intended. Assuring her that his intentions were strictly honourable Burns seized the opportunity to express far more ardent chivalry and devotion than he would probably have ventured on had she been free. In reply she suggested their writing under Arcadian pseudonyms—no doubt as evidence of the strictly Platonic nature of their sentiments; displayed her acquaintance with The Spectator by calling herself Clarinda; and suggested Sylvander for Burns. Having thus safely wrapped their correspondence in asbestos they relaxed in a vapour-bath of emotion.

Less than three weeks after Burns’s accident he was assuring Clarinda that she was a gloriously amiable fine woman and was promising life-long devotion. But he was not admitting her as yet into his inner doubts and perplexities. Margaret Chalmers was the only woman who shared those. In fact both Sylvander and Clarinda seemed to have reserved their more intimate communications for personal speech. Apparently not until their long-deferred second meeting in January did Burns tell her about Jean and his children and Clarinda give him the whole tale of her unhappy marriage. She also sought in both speech and writing to convert him to Mr. Kemp’s particular brand of Calvinism. But here even at the height of his infatuation she failed. The most she got was a partial recantation of his liking for the heroic qualities of Milton’s Satan.

So long as communication was limited to pen and ink the affair for Burns was little more than a literary exercise. After they began to meet it became different and, in its effects on him, worse. Physical nearness could not fail to stir a man of his temperament. Soon their conversation was supplemented by caresses which Clarinda, however, managed to keep within bounds. As a result, Burns left these interviews with his blood at fever heat. A servant-girl named Jenny Clow, successor to the Meg Cameron of the previous winter, provided the consummation which Clarinda denied, and in due course added yet another to his growing list of paternal, legal, and emotional perplexities.

Clarinda was of course unaware of Jenny’s existence, but she soon had other reasons for being uncomfortable. Edinburgh was not a city in which a gentlewoman could be indiscreet and get away with it. More than a dozen years later Euphemia Boswell told Joseph Farington that Edinburgh’s chief drawback was that everybody knew all his neighbours’ affairs. The poet’s visits to the Potterrow were freely discussed. Lord Craig heard of them and was annoyed by his kinswoman’s indiscretion; the Rev. Mr. Kemp heard of them and felt it his duty to admonish his parishioner. When Clarinda confided these troubles to Burns they of course roused him to new fervours of knight-errantry. Moreover, other agitations were intensifying the emotional stress of the love affair. A great lady named Mrs. Stewart who was expected to help his Excise project chose to lecture him on the error of his ways; rumours were afloat that William Creech was insolvent; above all there was bad news from Mauchline. Jean’s parents had this time chosen the heavy melodramatic role and had bidden their erring daughter not to darken their doors again. She was being sheltered by friendly Mrs. Muir of Tarbolton Mill, but her future was black. In these circumstances it is unjust in the extreme to judge Burns’s conduct by the cool standards of sobriety and sanity. The man was in such a state of frenzy that he cannot be held accountable for his words nor even for all his actions.

What had begun as a flirtation and had continued, in part at least, as a piece of play-acting had by the middle of February become an imbroglio. Burns and Clarinda, both of them sentimentalists whose roused emotions were stronger than their reason, had gone so far that they could no longer regard their relations as simple friendship. By the time Burns set out on the 18th for Mauchline by way of Glasgow he had indulged in a perfect delirium of sentiment and rash vows. If he had not actually pledged himself to wait until James M’Lehose should be considerate enough to die and leave Clarinda free to marry Sylvander it at least appears that she expected him to wait. Meanwhile they were to write to each other every day.

The artificial and hothouse nature of the affair is fully demonstrated by the change which came over Burns’s letters as soon as removal from Edinburgh plunged him into the chilly air of everyday. The promise of a daily letter was the first to fail. Burns reached Glasgow on the evening of the 18th to find Richard Brown awaiting him at the Black Bull Inn in the company of young William Burns, who had ridden up from Mauchline with his brother’s horse. Before settling to a convivial evening Burns managed to dispatch a hurried note to Clarinda, but it was four days before he found time to write again. His next letter shows how effectively those four days had brought him back from a sentimental dream-world to crude reality. Doubtless William had brought the latest bulletins about Jean, but no hint of them was passed on to Clarinda. A feverish day of entertainment among the prosperous weavers of Paisley was followed by two days of more decorous pleasure at Dunlop House and then by another wild bout at Kilmarnock. The letter from Kilmarnock is devoted mainly to a broadly humorous account of his Paisley host’s troubles with a daughter who had been to boarding school, a son who wanted a latchkey, and himself who thought it better to re-marry than to burn. Not a word about Jean, scarcely a word about worthy Mrs. Dunlop and none about artistic Miss Rachel and poetic Miss Keith—in short, just such a letter as Burns might have written to Bob Ainslie or Alexander Cunningham, and in comparison with all the previous Clarinda correspondence as inappropriate as Falstaff in love.

But this letter jars on the reader only because it is wrong in its context. Two which he wrote after his arrival at Mauchline on the 23rd jar for a different reason. Only one of these, however, was to Clarinda. She had given him a couple of little shirts for Baby Robert, who was being cared for at Mossgiel. As soon as he had delivered these and seen his family, Burns set off to interview ‘a certain woman’ at Tarbolton Mill. ‘I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her! I, while my heart smote me for the prophanity, tried to compare her with my Clarinda: ’twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender Passion. I have done with her and she with me.’

Of the many things in Burns’s life which might better have been left unsaid or undone this letter might claim first place were it not for the one he wrote to Bob Ainslie ten days later. Here he describes his reconciliation with Jean. What makes this letter revolting is not so much its biological detail as the realization that the alleged events which Burns describes occurred less than a fortnight before Jean’s confinement. On March 3 she again bore her lover twins, who did not live even long enough to be baptized. Still worse, if it is true, is his assertion that he had sworn Jean ‘privately and solemnly never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl....’ Here, however, it is more than possible that he was talking brazenly for Ainslie’s edification; Henley’s doubt that Mrs. Armour could have been reconciled to her daughter without a promise of marriage seems well founded. Moreover the statement proves that by this time, whatever he may have thought in 1786, Burns realized that the destruction of the original marriage lines had not necessarily voided the contract.

Whatever he said or did at his first interview with Jean he must, before he returned to Edinburgh in March, have made up his mind that sooner or later he would acknowledge Jean as his wife. The letters to Clarinda during the remaining two weeks of his absence were noticeably lacking in fervour. They contained, however, more news about his personal affairs, especially the doubts and uncertainties that still kept him hesitating between farming and the Excise, than any of the earlier ones did. An unsolved mystery in his life is the nature of his relations with Clarinda during the fortnight he spent in Edinburgh in March. To the modern reader with full knowledge of the facts the fervour of his latest letters seems still more forced and artificial than before, but it may be questioned if this truth was equally obvious to Clarinda. Indeed their final meeting, at which Burns presented her with a pair of drinking-glasses, a poem, and an inscribed copy of Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’, clearly had enough romantic intensity to satisfy even Clarinda. Herein lies the mystery. The later developments prove that Burns had told her nothing of his reconciliation with Jean, yet Burns was not a man who could ordinarily act a part convincingly. This time he must have tried. The results, combined with anxiety over livelihood, are displayed in a letter of March 20, in which he told Richard Brown that worry over his lease, ‘racking shop accounts’ with Creech, ‘together with watching, fatigue, and a load of care almost too heavy for my shoulders, have in some degree actually fever’d me.... These eight days, I have been positively crazed.’

He returned to Mauchline on the 22d to receive his six weeks of Excise instructions, publicly to acknowledge Jean as his wife, and incidentally to compose a formula whereby to explain his action to his friends and patrons: