Since there may still be readers who suppose that Burns was a mere unsophisticated singer, without power of self-criticism, it may be as well to insert here a passage from a Commonplace Book written in 1783, ten years after the composition of the song.
Criticism on the Foregoing Song
“Lest my works should be thought below Criticism; or meet with a Critic who, perhaps, will not look on them with so candid and favorable an eye; I am determined to criticise them myself.
“The first distich of the first stanza is quite too much in the flimsy strain of our ordinary street ballads; and on the other hand, the second distich is too much in the other extreme. The expression is a little awkward, and the sentiment too serious. Stanza the second I am well pleased with; and I think it conveys a fine idea of that amiable part of the Sex—the agreeables, or what in our Scotch dialect we call a sweet sonsy Lass. The third Stanza has a little of the flimsy turn in it; and the third line has rather too serious a cast. The fourth Stanza is a very indifferent one; the first line is, indeed, all in the strain of the second Stanza, but the rest is mostly an expletive. The thoughts in the fifth Stanza come fairly up to my favorite idea [of] a sweet sonsy Lass. The last line, however, halts a little. The same sentiments are kept up with equal spirit and tenderness in the sixth Stanza, but the second and fourth lines ending with short syllables hurts the whole. The seventh Stanza has several minute faults; but I remember I composed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, and my blood sallies at the remembrance.”
In spite of the early start in poetry given him by Nelly Kilpatrick, he did not produce more than a few pieces of permanent value during the next ten years. He did, however, go on developing and branching out in his social activities, in spite of the depressing grind of the farm. He attended a dancing school (much against his father's will), helped to establish a “Bachelors' Club” for debating, and found time for further love-affairs. That with Ellison Begbie, celebrated by him in The Lass of Cessnock Banks, he took very seriously, and he proposed marriage to the girl in some portentously solemn epistles which remain to us as the earliest examples of his prose. In order to put himself in a position to marry, he determined to learn the trade of flax-dressing; and though Ellison refused him, he went to the neighboring seaport of Irvine to carry out his purpose in the summer of 1781. The flax-dressing experiment ended disastrously with a fire which burned the workshop, and Burns returned penniless to the farm. The poems written about this time express profound melancholy, a mood natural enough in the circumstances, and aggravated by his poor nervous and physical condition.
But his spirit could not remain permanently depressed, and shortly after his return to Lochlea, a trifling accident to a ewe he had bought prompted him to the following delightful and characteristic production.
THE DEATH AND DYING WORDS OF POOR MAILIE, THE AUTHOR'S ONLY PET YOWE
POOR MAILIE'S ELEGY
How long he continued to mourn for Ellison Begbie, it is hard to say; but the three following songs, inspired, it would seem, by three different girls, testify at once to his power of recuperation and the rapid maturing of his talent. All seem to have been written between the date of his return from Irvine and the death of his father.
MARY MORISON
MY NANNIE O
THE RIGS O' BARLEY
2. Mossgiel
On the death of their father, Robert and Gilbert Burns moved with the family to the farm of Mossgiel in the next parish of Mauchline. By putting in a claim for arrears of wages, they succeeded in drawing enough from the wreck of their father's estate to supply a scanty stock for the new venture. The records of the first summer show the poet in anything but a happy frame of mind. His health was miserable; and the loosening of his moral principles, which he ascribes to the influence of a young sailor he had met at Irvine, bore fruit in the birth to him of an illegitimate daughter by a servant girl, Elizabeth Paton. The verses which carry allusion to this affair are illuminating for his character. One group is devout and repentant; the other marked sometimes by cynical bravado, sometimes by a note of exultation. Both may be regarded as genuine enough expressions of moods which alternated throughout his life, and which corresponded to conflicting sides of his nature. Here is a typical example of the former:
A PRAYER IN THE PROSPECT OF DEATH
In his Epistle to John Rankine, with a somewhat hard and heartless humor, he braves out the affair; in the following Welcome he treats it with a tender pride, as sincere as his remorse:
THE POET'S WELCOME TO HIS LOVE-BEGOTTEN DAUGHTER
At Mossgiel the Burns family was no more successful than in either of its previous farms. Bad seed and bad weather gave two poor harvests, and by the summer of 1786 the poet's financial condition was again approaching desperation. His situation was made still more embarrassing by the consequences of another of his amours. Shortly after moving to the parish of Mauchline he had fallen in love with Jean Armour, the daughter of a mason in the village. What was for Burns a prolonged courtship ensued, and in the spring of 1786 he learned that Jean's condition was such that he gave her a paper acknowledging her as his wife. To his surprise and mortification the girl's father, who is said to have had a personal dislike to him and who well may have thought a man with his reputation and prospects was no promising son-in-law, opposed the marriage, forced Jean to give up the paper, and sent her off to another town. Burns chose to regard Jean's submission to her father as inexcusable faithlessness, and proceeded to indulge in the ecstatic misery of the lover betrayed. There is no doubt that he suffered keenly from the affair: he writes to his friends that he could “have no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment” than what he had felt in his “own breast on her account. I have tried often to forget her: I have run into all kinds of dissipation and riot ... to drive her out of my head, but all in vain.” This is in a later letter than that in which he has “sunk into a lurid calm,” and “subsided into the time-settled sorrow of the sable widower.”
Yet other evidence shows that at this crisis also Burns's emotional experience was far from simple. It was probably during the summer of the same year that there occurred the passages with the mysterious Highland Mary, a girl whose identity, after voluminous controversy, remains vague, but who inspired some of his loftiest love poetry. Though Burns's feeling for her seems to have been a kind of interlude in reaction from the “cruelty” of Jean, he idealized it beyond his wont, and the subject of it has been exalted to the place among his heroines which is surely due to the long-suffering woman who became his wife.
In this same summer Burns formed the project of emigrating. He proposed to go to the West Indies, and return for Jean when he had made provision to support her. This offer was refused by James Armour, but Burns persevered with the plan, obtained a position in Jamaica, and in the autumn engaged passage in a ship sailing from Greenock. The song, Will Ye Go to the Indies; My Mary, seems to imply that Highland Mary was invited to accompany him, but substantial evidence of this, as of most things concerning his relations with Mary Campbell, is lacking. From Thee, Eliza, I Must Go, supposed to be addressed to Elizabeth Miller, also belongs to this summer, and is taken to refer to another of the “under-plots in his drama of love.”
Meantime, at the suggestion of his friend and patron, Gavin Hamilton, Burns had begun to arrange for a subscription edition of his poems. It seems to have been only after he went to Mossgiel that he had seriously conceived the idea of writing for publication, and the decision was followed by a year of the most extraordinary fertility in composition. To 1785-1786 are assigned such satires as Holy Willie and the Address to the Unco Guid; a group of the longer poems including The Cotter's Saturday Night, The Jolly Beggars, Halloween, The Holy Fair, The Twa Dogs and The Vision; some shorter but no less famous pieces, such as the poems To a Louse, To a Mouse, To the Deil, To a Mountain Daisy and Scotch Drink; and a number of the best of his Epistles. Many of these, especially the church satires, had obtained a considerable local fame through circulation in manuscript, so that, proposals having been issued for an edition to be printed by Wilson of Kilmarnock, it was not found difficult to obtain subscriptions for more than half the edition of six hundred and twelve copies. The prospect of some return from this enterprise induced James Armour to take legal measures to obtain support for Jean's expected child, and Burns, fearing imprisonment, was forced to go into hiding while his book was passing the press. The church, too, had taken cognizance of his offense, and both Jean and he had to stand up before the congregation on three occasions to receive rebuke and make profession of repentance. He was at the same time completing the preparations for his voyage. In such extraordinary circumstances appeared the famous Kilmarnock edition, the immediate success of which soon produced a complete alteration in the whole outlook of the poet.
In the first place, the consideration Burns gained from his volume induced Armour to relax his pursuit, and in September, when Jean became the mother of twins, the poet was in such a mood that the sentiment of paternity began to weigh against the proposed emigration. Some weeks later he learned through a friend that Doctor Blacklock, a poet and scholar of standing in literary circles in Edinburgh, had praised his volume highly, and urged a second and larger edition. The upshot was that he gave up his passage (his trunk had been packed and was part way to Greenock), and determined instead on a visit to Edinburgh. The only permanent result of the whole West Indian scheme was thus a sheaf of amorous and patriotic farewells, of which the following may be taken as examples:
WILL YE GO TO THE INDIES, MY MARY?
THE GLOOMY NIGHT
ON A SCOTCH BARD, GONE TO THE WEST INDIES
3. Edinburgh
On the twenty-seventh of November, 1786, mounted on a borrowed pony, Burns set out for Edinburgh. He seems to have arrived there without definite plans, for, after having found lodging with his old friend Richmond, he spent the first few days strolling about the city. At home Burns had been an enthusiastic freemason, and it was through a masonic friend, Mr. James Dalrymple of Orangefield, near Ayr, that he was introduced to Edinburgh society. A decade or two earlier, that society, under the leadership of men like Adam Smith and David Hume had reached a high degree of intellectual distinction. A decade or two later, under Sir Walter Scott and the Reviewers it was again to be in some measure, if for the last time, a rival to London as a literary center. But when Burns visited it there was a kind of interregnum, and, little though he or they guessed it, none of the celebrities he met possessed genius comparable to his own. In a very few weeks it was evident that he was to be the lion of the season. By December thirteenth he is writing to a friend at Ayr:
“I have found a worthy warm friend in Mr. Dalrymple, of Orangefield, who introduced me to Lord Glencairn, a man whose worth and brotherly kindness to me I shall remember when time shall be no more. By his interest it is passed in the Caledonian Hunt, and entered in their books, that they are to take each a copy of the second edition [of the poems], for which they are to pay one guinea. I have been introduced to a good many of the Noblesse, but my avowed patrons and patronesses are the Duchess of Gordon, the Countess of Glencairn, with my Lord and Lady Betty—the Dean of Faculty [Honorable Henry Erskine]—Sir John Whitefoord. I have likewise warm friends among the literati; Professors [Dugald] Stewart, Blair, and Mr. Mackenzie—the Man of Feeling.”
Through Glencairn he met Creech the book-seller, with whom he arranged for his second edition, and through the patrons he mentions and the Edinburgh freemasons, among whom he was soon at home, a large subscription list was soon made up. In the Edinburgh Magazine for October, November, and December, James Sibbald had published favorable notices of the Kilmarnock edition, with numerous extracts, and when Henry Mackenzie gave it high praise in his Lounger for December ninth, and the London Monthly Review followed suit in the same month, it was felt that the poet's reputation was established.
Of Burns's bearing in the fashionable and cultivated society into which he so suddenly found himself plunged we have many contemporary accounts. They are practically unanimous in praise of the taste and tact with which he acquitted himself. While neither shy nor aggressive, he impressed every one with his brilliance in conversation, his shrewdness in observation, and criticism, and his poise and common sense in his personal relations. One of the best descriptions of him was given by Sir Walter Scott to Lockhart. Scott as a boy of sixteen met Burns at the house of Doctor Adam Ferguson, and thus reports:
“His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents.... I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school; that is, none of your modern agriculturists who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce guidman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments: the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a cast which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed an opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty.... I have only to add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in malam partem, when I say I never saw a man in company with his superiors in station and information, more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. I have heard the Duchess of Gordon remark this.”
Burns's letters written at this time show an amused consciousness of his social prominence, but never for a moment did he lose sight of the fact that it was only the affair of a season, and that in a few months he would have to resume his humble station. Yet this intellectual detachment did not prevent his enjoying opportunities for social and intellectual intercourse such as he had never known and was never again to know. Careful as he was to avoid presuming on his new privileges, he clearly threw himself into the discussions in which he took part with all the zest of his temperament; and in the less formal convivial clubs to which he was welcomed he became at once the king of good fellows. To the noblemen and others who befriended him he expressed himself in language which may seem exaggerated; but the warmth of his disposition, and the letter writers of the eighteenth century on whom he had formed his style, sufficiently account for it without the suspicion of affectation or flattery. Whatever his vices, ingratitude to those who showed him kindness was not among them; and the sympathetic reader is more apt to feel pathos than to take offense in his tributes to his patrons. The real though not extraordinary kindness of the Earl of Glencairn, for example, was acknowledged again and again in prose and verse; and the Lament Burns wrote upon his death closes with these lines which rewarded the noble lord with an immortality he might otherwise have missed:
After a sojourn of a little more than five months, Burns left Edinburgh early in May for a tour in the south of Scotland. The poet was mounted on an old mare, Jenny Geddes, which he had bought in Edinburgh, and which he still owned when he settled at Ellisland. He was accompanied by his bosom friend, Robert Ainslie. The letters and journals written during the four weeks of this tour give evidence of his appreciation of scenery and his shrewd judgment of character. He was received with much consideration in the houses he visited, and was given the freedom of the burgh of Dumfries. On the ninth of June, 1787, he was back at Mauchline; and, calling at Armour's house to see his child, he was revolted by the “mean, servile complaisance” he met with—the result of his Edinburgh triumphs. His disgust at the family, however, did not prevent a renewal of his intimacy with Jean. After a few days at home, he seems to have made a short tour in the West Highlands. July was spent at Mossgiel, and early in August he returned to Edinburgh in order to settle his accounts with Creech, his publisher. On the twenty-fifth he set out for a longer tour in the North accompanied by his friend Nicol, an Edinburgh schoolmaster, the Willie who “brewed a peck o' maut.” They proceeded by Linlithgow, Falkirk, Stirling, Crieff, Dunkeld, Aberfeldie, Blair Athole, Strathspey, to Inverness. The most notable episode of the journey northwards was a visit at the castle of the Duke of Athole, which passed with great satisfaction to both Burns and his hosts, and of which his Humble Petition of Bruar Water is a poetical memorial. At Stonehaven and Montrose he extended his acquaintance among his father's relatives. He reached Edinburgh again on September sixteenth, having traveled nearly six hundred miles. In October he made still another excursion, through Clackmannanshire and into the south of Perthshire, visiting Ramsay of Ochtertyre, near Stirling, and Sir William Murray of Ochtertyre in Strathearn. In all these visits made by Burns to the houses of the aristocracy, it is interesting to note his capacity for pleasing and profitable intercourse with people of a class and tradition far removed from his own. Sensitive to an extreme and quick to resent a slight, he was at the same time finely responsive to kindness, and his conduct was governed by a tact and frank naturalness that are among the not least surprising of his powers. In spite of the fervor and floridness of some of his expressions of gratitude for favors from his noble friends, Burns was no snob; and it was characteristic of him to give up a visit to the Duchess of Gordon rather than separate from his companion Nicol, who, in a fit of jealous sulks, refused to accompany him to Castle Gordon.
The settlement with Creech proved to be a very tedious affair, and in the beginning of December the poet was about to leave the city in disgust when an accident occurred which gave opportunity for one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of his relations with women. Just before, he had met a Mrs. McLehose who lived in Edinburgh with her three children, while her husband, from whom she had separated on account of ill-treatment, had emigrated to Jamaica. A correspondence began immediately after the first meeting, with the following letter:
“Madam:
“I had set no small store by my tea-drinking tonight, and have not often been so disappointed. Saturday evening I shall embrace the opportunity with the greatest pleasure. I leave this town this day se'ennight, and probably I shall not return for a couple of twelvemonths; but I must ever regret that I so lately got an acquaintance I shall ever highly esteem, and in whose welfare I shall ever be warmly interested. Our worthy common friend, Miss Nimmo, in her usual pleasant way, rallied me a good deal on my new acquaintance, and, in the humour of her ideas, I wrote some lines, which I enclose to you, as I think they have a good deal of poetic merit; and Miss Nimmo tells me that you are not only a critic but a poetess. Fiction, you know, is the native region of poetry; and I hope you will pardon my vanity in sending you the bagatelle as a tolerable offhand jeu d'esprit. I have several poetic trifles, which I shall gladly leave with Miss Nimmo or you, if they were worth house-room; as there are scarcely two people on earth by whom it would mortify me more to be forgotten, though at the distance of nine score miles. I am, Madam, With the highest respect,
“Your very humble servant,
“Robert Burns.”[December 6, 1787.]
The night before Burns was to take tea with his new acquaintance, he was overturned by a drunken coachman, and received an injury to his knee which confined him to his rooms for several weeks. Meantime the correspondence went on with ever-increasing warmth, from “Madam,” through “My dearest Madam,” “my dear kind friend,” “my lovely friend,” to “my dearest angel.” They early agreed to call each other Clarinda and Sylvander, and the Arcadian names are significant of the sentimental nature of the relation. By the time of their second meeting—about a month after the first,—they had exchanged intimate confidences, had discovered endless affinities, and had argued by the page on religion, Clarinda striving to win Sylvander over to her orthodox Calvinism. When he was again able to go out, his visits became for both of them “exquisite” and “rapturous” experiences, Clarinda struggling to keep on the safe side of discretion by means of “Reason” and “Religion,” Sylvander protesting his complete submission to her will. The appearance of passion in their letters goes on increasing, and Clarinda's fits of perturbation in the next morning's reflections grow more acute. She does not seem to have become the poet's mistress, and it is impossible to gather what either of them expected the outcome of their intercourse to be. With a few notable exceptions, the verses which were occasioned rather than inspired by the affair are affected and artificial; and in spite of the warmth of the expressions in his letters it is hard to believe that his passion went very deep. In any case, on his return to Mauchline to find Jean Armour cast out by her own people after having a second time borne him twins, he faced his responsibilities in a more manly and honorable fashion than ever before, and made Jean his wife. The explanation of his final resolution is given repeatedly in almost the same words in his letters: “I found a much loved female's positive happiness or absolute misery among my hands, and I could not trifle with such a sacred deposit.” It would appear that, however far the affair between him and Clarinda had passed beyond the sentimental friendship it began with, he did not regard it as placing in his hands any such “sacred deposit” as the fate of Jean, nor had one or two intrigues with obscure girls in Edinburgh shaken an affection which was much more deep-rooted than he often imagined. Clarinda was naturally deeply wounded by his marriage, and her reproaches of “villainy” led to a breach which was only gradually bridged. At one time, just before she set out for Jamaica to join her husband in an unsuccessful attempt at a reconciliation, Burns's letters again became frequent, the old fervor reappeared, and a couple of his best songs were produced. But at this time he had the—shall we say reassuring?—belief that he was not to see her again, and could indulge an emotion that had always been largely theatrical without risk to either of them. On her return he wrote her, it would seem, only once. For the character of Burns the incident is of much curious interest; for literature its importance lies in the two songs, Ae fond Kiss and My Nannie's Awa. The former was written shortly before her departure for the West Indies; the second in the summer of her absence. It is noteworthy that in them “Clarinda” has given place to “Nancy” and “Nannie.” Beside them is placed for contrast, one of the pure Clarinda effusions.