To write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeling and some common ground of experience with our subject.  We may praise or blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be his judges, even to condemn.  Feelings which we share and understand enter for us into the tissue of the man’s character; those to which we are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that we respect or virtues that we admire.  David, king of Israel, would pass a sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume.  Now, Principal Shairp’s recent volume, although I believe no one will read it without respect and interest, has this one capital defect—that there is imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the critic and the personality under criticism.  Hence an inorganic, if not an incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man.  Of Holy Willie’s Prayer, Principal Shairp remarks that “those who have loved most what was best in Burns’s poetry must have regretted that it was ever written.”  To the Jolly Beggars, so far as my memory serves me, he refers but once; and then only to remark on the “strange, not to say painful,” circumstance that the same hand which wrote the Cotter’s Saturday Night should have stooped to write the Jolly Beggars.  The Saturday Night may or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears, when it is set beside the Jolly Beggars.  To take a man’s work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic’s duty.  The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken, apologetical, and confused.  The man here presented to us is not that Burns, teres atque rotundus—a burly figure in literature, as, from our present vantage of time, we have begun to see him.  This, on the other hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary clergyman, whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt and disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot protégé, and solacing himself with the explanation that the poet was “the most inconsistent of men.”  If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject, and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer.  Indeed, we can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen a theme so uncongenial.  When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes neither Holy Willie, nor the Beggars, nor the Ordination, nothing is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Géronte: “Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?”  And every merit we find in the book, which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns, only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so greatly thrown away.

It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that has been so often told; but there are certainly some points in the character of Burns that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life that demand a brief rehearsal.  The unity of the man’s nature, for all its richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers.  Mr. Carlyle made an inimitable bust of the poet’s head of gold; may I not be forgiven if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were of clay?

Youth.

Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the influences of his home and his father.  That father, William Burnes, after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and, like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own hands.  Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life.  Chill, backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family, he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature.  On his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more result in theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects as he delved the garden.  His great delight was in solid conversation; he would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert, when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and vigorous talk.  Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general, and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense and resolution with which he set himself to supply the deficiency by his own influence.  For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men; at night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he borrowed books for them on history, science, and theology; and he felt it his duty to supplement this last—the trait is laughably Scottish—by a dialogue of his own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was exactly represented.  He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield herding cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or to sit by her side when it thundered.  Distance to strangers, deep family tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of theology—everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up a popular Scotch type.  If I mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it is only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old Marshal Loudon, to help out the reader’s comprehension by a popular but unworthy instance of a class.  Such was the influence of this good and wise man that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours who came into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father, brothers, and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a book in the other.  We are surprised at the prose style of Robert; that of Gilbert need surprise us no less; even William writes a remarkable letter for a young man of such slender opportunities.  One anecdote marks the taste of the family.  Murdoch brought Titus Andronicus, and, with such dominie elocution as we may suppose, began to read it aloud before this rustic audience; but when he had reached the passage where Tamora insults Lavinia, with one voice and “in an agony of distress” they refused to hear it to an end.  In such a father and with such a home, Robert had already the making of an excellent education; and what Murdoch added, although it may not have been much in amount, was in character the very essence of a literary training.  Schools and colleges, for one great man whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen; the strong spirit can do well upon more scanty fare.

Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete character—a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy of notice; in his own phrase “panting after distinction,” and in his brother’s “cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or of more consequence than himself:” with all this, he was emphatically of the artist nature.  Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, “and his plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner round his shoulders.”  Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland broadsword.  He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake.  This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter; and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and remark.  His father wrote the family name Burnes; Robert early adopted the orthography Burness from his cousin in the Mearns; and in his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to Burns.  It is plain that the last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in addressing his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to spelling number two.  And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the manner of his appearance even down to the name, and little willing to follow custom.  Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in conversation.  To no other man’s have we the same conclusive testimony from different sources and from every rank of life.  It is almost a commonplace that the best of his works was what he said in talk.  Robertson the historian “scarcely ever met any man whose conversation displayed greater vigour;” the Duchess of Gordon declared that he “carried her off her feet;” and, when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear him talk.  But, in these early days at least, he was determined to shine by any means.  He made himself feared in the village for his tongue.  He would crush weaker men to their faces, or even perhaps—for the statement of Sillar is not absolute—say cutting things of his acquaintances behind their back.  At the church door, between sermons, he would parade his religious views amid hisses.  These details stamp the man.  He had no genteel timidities in the conduct of his life.  He loved to force his personality upon the world.  He would please himself, and shine.  Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing Jehan for Jean, swaggering in Gautier’s red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public café with paradox and gasconnade.

A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to be in love.  Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut.  His affections were often enough touched, but perhaps never engaged.  He was all his life on a voyage of discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he ever touched the happy isle.  A man brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and even from childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital malady.  Burns was formed for love; he had passion, tenderness, and a singular bent in the direction; he could foresee, with the intuition of an artist, what love ought to be; and he could not conceive a worthy life without it.  But he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after every shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a strong temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart had lost the power of self-devotion before an opportunity occurred.  The circumstances of his youth doubtless counted for something in the result.  For the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day’s work was over and the beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a winter tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour or two in courtship.  Rule 10 of the Bachelors’ Club at Tarbolton provides that “every man proper for a member of this Society must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex.”  The rich, as Burns himself points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but these lads had nothing but their “cannie hour at e’en.”  It was upon love and flirtation that this rustic society was built; gallantry was the essence of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the Court of Versailles; and the days were distinguished from each other by love-letters, meetings, tiffs, reconciliations, and expansions to the chosen confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux.  Here was a field for a man of Burns’s indiscriminate personal ambition, where he might pursue his voyage of discovery in quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs by the way.  He was “constantly the victim of some fair enslaver”—at least, when it was not the other way about; and there were often underplots and secondary fair enslavers in the background.  Many—or may we not say most?—of these affairs were entirely artificial.  One, he tells us, he began out of “a vanity of showing his parts in courtship,” for he piqued himself on his ability at a love-letter.  But, however they began, these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the end; and he stands unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively without a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of “battering himself into a warm affection,”—a debilitating and futile exercise.  Once he had worked himself into the vein, “the agitations of his mind and body” were an astonishment to all who knew him.  Such a course as this, however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature.  He sank more and more towards the professional Don Juan.  With a leer of what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard.  We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up an acquaintance with women: he would have conquering manners; he would bear down upon his rustic game with the grace that comes of absolute assurance—the Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel.  In yet another manner did these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame.  If he were great as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant.  He could enter into a passion; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own phrase, so old a hawk; nay, he could turn a letter for some unlucky swain, or even string a few lines of verse that should clinch the business and fetch the hesitating fair one to the ground.  Nor, perhaps, was it only his “curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity” that recommended him for a second in such affairs; it must have been a distinction to have the assistance and advice of Rab the Ranter; and one who was in no way formidable by himself might grow dangerous and attractive through the fame of his associate.

I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that rough moorland country, poor among the poor with his seven pounds a year, looked upon with doubt by respectable elders, but for all that the best talker, the best letter-writer, the most famous lover and confidant, the laureate poet, and the only man who wore his hair tied in the parish.  He says he had then as high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can well believe it.  Among the youth he walked facile princeps, an apparent god; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend Mr. Auld should swoop upon him with the thunders of the Church, and, in company with seven others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday on the stool of repentance, would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal apotheosis, in so conspicuous a shame?  Was not Richelieu in disgrace more idolised than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was the highwayman most acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn?  Or, to take a simile from nearer home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even corporal punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly school-master, against the influence and fame of the school’s hero?

And now we come to the culminating point of Burns’s early period.  He began to be received into the unknown upper world.  His fame soon spread from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy.  This arose in part from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent skirmish; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition party,—a clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit enough to appreciate the value of the poet’s help, and not sufficient taste to moderate his grossness and personality.  We may judge of their surprise when Holy Willie was put into their hand; like the amorous lads of Tarbolton, they recognised in him the best of seconds.  His satires began to go the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the lawyers, “read him into fame;” he himself was soon welcome in many houses of a better sort, where his admirable talk, and his manners, which he had direct from his Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a country dancing school, completed what his poems had begun.  We have a sight of him at his first visit to Adamhill, in his ploughman’s shoes, coasting around the carpet as though that were sacred ground.  But he soon grew used to carpets and their owners; and he was still the superior of all whom he encountered, and ruled the roost in conversation.  Such was the impression made, that a young clergyman, himself a man of ability, trembled and became confused when he saw Robert enter the church in which he was to preach.  It is not surprising that the poet determined to publish: he had now stood the test of some publicity, and under this hopeful impulse he composed in six winter months the bulk of his more important poems.  Here was a young man who, from a very humble place, was mounting rapidly; from the cynosure of a parish, he had become the talk of a county; once the bard of rural courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and printed poet in the world’s bookshops.

A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the sketch.  This strong young plough-man, who feared no competitor with the flail, suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past and terror for the future.  He was still not perhaps devoted to religion, but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself before God in what I can only call unmanly penitence.  As he had aspirations beyond his place in the world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and weaknesses to match.  He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a winter tempest; he had a singular tenderness for animals; he carried a book with him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore out in this service two copies of the Man of Feeling.  With young people in the field at work he was very long-suffering; and when his brother Gilbert spoke sharply to them—“O man, ye are no for young folk,” he would say, and give the defaulter a helping hand and a smile.  In the hearts of the men whom he met, he read as in a book; and, what is yet more rare, his knowledge of himself equalled his knowledge of others.  There are no truer things said of Burns than what is to be found in his own letters.  Country Don Juan as he was, he had none of that blind vanity which values itself on what it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness to a hair: he took himself boldly for what he was, and, except in moments of hypochondria, declared himself content.

The Love Stories.

On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom.  In the same set danced Jean Armour, the master-mason’s daughter, and our dark-eyed Don Juan.  His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame, caret quia vate sacro), apparently sensible of some neglect, followed his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers.  Some mirthful comments followed; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner—or, as I should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the company at large—that “he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as well as his dog.”  Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on Mauchline green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog; and the dog, “scouring in long excursion,” scampered with four black paws across the linen.  This brought the two into conversation; when Jean, with a somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if “he had yet got any of the lasses to like him as well as his dog?”

It is one of the misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour forbids him to refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon duty, or like the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases.  Burns accepted the provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a girl—pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might here be waiting him.  Had he but known the truth! for this facile and empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by another man.  Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of “battering himself into a warm affection;” and the proofs of his success are to be found in many verses of the period.  Nor did he succeed with himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became manifest.  It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple.  They had trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life’s serious issues.  Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to expect was marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest thoughts; she might now be glad if she could get what she would never have chosen.  As for Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised that his voyage of discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere—that he was not, and never had been, really in love with Jean.  Hear him in the pressure of the hour.  “Against two things,” he writes, “I am as fixed as fate—staying at home, and owning her conjugally.  The first, by heaven, I will not do!—the last, by hell, I will never do!”  And then he adds, perhaps already in a more relenting temper: “If you see Jean, tell her I will meet her, so God help me in my hour of need.”  They met accordingly; and Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these heights of independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of marriage.  It is the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually false positions—relations in life which are wrong in themselves, and which it is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate.  This was such a case.  Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be glad that Burns was better counselled by his heart.  When we discover that we can be no longer true, the next best is to be kind.  I daresay he came away from that interview not very content, but with a glorious conscience; and as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, “How are Thy servants blest, O Lord!”  Jean, on the other hand, armed with her “lines,” confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his wife.  Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves in their farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do country lass; and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous attachment on his daughter’s part.  At least, he was not so much incensed by her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to cover it.  Of this he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the acknowledgment only to appease her parents, and not at all from any violent inclination to the poet, readily gave up the paper for destruction; and all parties imagined, although wrongly, that the marriage was thus dissolved.  To a proud man like Burns here was a crushing blow.  The concession which had been wrung from his pity was now publicly thrown back in his teeth.  The Armour family preferred disgrace to his connection.  Since the promise, besides, he had doubtless been busy “battering himself” back again into his affection for the girl; and the blow would not only take him in his vanity, but wound him at the heart.

He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript poetry was insufficient to console him.  He must find a more powerful remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love.  It is perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon another.  The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor, insulted poet ran once more upon his fate.  There was an innocent and gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret engagement.  Jean’s marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13, 1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May 14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic solemnities upon the banks of Ayr.  They each wet their hands in a stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as they vowed eternal faith.  Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding nature of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the wandering affections, here were two people united for life.  Mary came of a superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his tottering constancy.

Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet’s life.  His book was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment of the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he was under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his wife; now, he had “orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard the Nancy, Captain Smith;” now his chest was already on the road to Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he measures verses of farewell:—

“The bursting tears my heart declare;
Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!”

But the great master dramatist had secretly another intention for the piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation.  Jean was brought to bed of twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to bring up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother.  The success of the book was immediate and emphatic; it put £20 at once into the author’s purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh and push his success in a second and larger edition.  Third and last in these series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm for Robert.  He went to the window to read it; a sudden change came over his face, and he left the room without a word.  Years afterwards, when the story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then learned the death of Highland Mary.  Except in a few poems and a few dry indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no reference to this passage of his life; it was an adventure of which, for I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details.  Of one thing we may be glad: in after years he visited the poor girl’s mother, and left her with the impression that he was “a real warm-hearted chield.”

Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend.  The town that winter was “agog with the ploughman poet.”  Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair, “Duchess Gordon and all the gay world,” were of his acquaintance.  Such a revolution is not to be found in literary history.  He was now, it must be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the furrow wielding “the thresher’s weary flingin’-tree;” and his education, his diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scotch countryman.  Now he stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned.  We can see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday best; the heavy ploughman’s figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought, and his large dark eye “literally glowing” as he spoke.  “I never saw such another eye in a human head,” says Walter Scott, “though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.”  With men, whether they were lords or omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified, and free from bashfulness or affectation.  If he made a slip, he had the social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation.  He was not embarrassed in this society, because he read and judged the men; he could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and, as for the critics, he dismissed their system in an epigram.  “These gentlemen,” said he, “remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.”  Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him; he was scarce commander of himself in their society; he was disqualified by his acquired nature as a Don Juan; and he, who had been so much at his ease with country lasses, treated the town dames to an extreme of deference.  One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers a speaking sketch of his demeanour.  “His manner was not prepossessing—scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural.  It seemed as if he affected a rusticity or landertness, so that when he said the music was ‘bonnie, bonnie,’ it was like the expression of a child.”  These would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree of intimacy the affectation would grow less.  And his talk to women had always “a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the attention particularly.”

The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well to Burns from first to last.  Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help.  Although Burns was only a peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made welcome to their homes.  They gave him a great deal of good advice, helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise.  Burns, on his part, bore the elevation with perfect dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when the time had come, into a country privacy of life.  His powerful sense never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day.  He wrote a few letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect.  On the other hand, he never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the acquaintance were a duke.  He would be a bold man who should promise similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances.  It was, in short, an admirable appearance on the stage of life—socially successful, intimately self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.

In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we return to Burns’s love affairs.  Even on the road to Edinburgh he had seized upon the opportunity of a flirtation, and had carried the “battering” so far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal two days with this anonymous fair one.  The exact importance to Burns of this affair may be gathered from the song in which he commemorated its occurrence.  “I love the dear lassie,” he sings, “because she loves me;” or, in the tongue of prose: “Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate to profit by it, and even now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to profit by it again.”  A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man.  Meantime, early in the winter, and only once, we find him regretting Jean in his correspondence.  “Because”—such is his reason—“because he does not think he will ever meet so delicious an armful again;” and then, after a brief excursion into verse, he goes straight on to describe a new episode in the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a Lothian farmer for a heroine.  I must ask the reader to follow all these references to his future wife; they are essential to the comprehension of Burns’s character and fate.  In June, we find him back at Mauchline, a famous man.  There, the Armour family greeted him with a “mean, servile compliance,” which increased his former disgust.  Jean was not less compliant; a second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of the man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent.  Judge of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return—a letter to my mind among the most degrading in the whole collection—a letter which seems to have been inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman.  “I am afraid,” it goes, “I have almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my former happiness—the eternal propensity I always had to fall in love.  My heart no more glows with feverish rapture; I have no paradisiacal evening interviews.”  Even the process of “battering” has failed him, you perceive.  Still he had some one in his eye—a lady, if you please, with a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had “seen the politest quarters in Europe.”  “I frequently visited her,” he writes, “and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant formal bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after her return to —, I wrote her in the same terms.  Miss, construing my remarks further than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I had to travel before I could reach the climate of her favours.  But I am an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my foot, like Corporal Trim’s hat.”  I avow a carnal longing, after this transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears.  There is little question that to this lady he must have repeated his addresses, and that he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly, rejected.  One more detail to characterise the period.  Six months after the date of this letter, Burns, back in Edinburgh, is served with a writ in meditatione fugæ, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family.

About the beginning of December (1787), a new period opens in the story of the poet’s random affections.  He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes M’Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband.  She had wit, could use her pen, and had read Werther with attention.  Sociable, and even somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable, but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties.  Of what biographers refer to daintily as “her somewhat voluptuous style of beauty,” judging from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas’s invaluable edition, the reader will be fastidious if he does not approve.  Take her for all in all, I believe she was the best woman Burns encountered.  The pair took a fancy for each other on the spot; Mrs. M’Lehose, in her turn, invited him to tea; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a tête-à-tête, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit instead.  An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence.  It was begun in simple sport; they are already at their fifth or sixth exchange, when Clarinda writes: “It is really curious so much fun passing between two persons who saw each other only once;” but it is hardly safe for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance.  The exercise partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be apprehended when next they meet.  It is difficult to give any account of this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps, not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura passages, into downright truculent nonsense.  Clarinda has one famous sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.  “Oh, Clarinda,” writes Burns, “shall we not meet in a state—some yet unknown state—of being, where the lavish hand of Plenty shall minister to the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of Prudence shall never blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?”  The design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a Bird of Paradise.  It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely making fun of each other as they write.  Religion, poetry, love, and charming sensibility, are the current topics.  “I am delighted, charming Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion,” writes Burns; and the pair entertained a fiction that this was their “favourite subject.”  “This is Sunday,” writes the lady, “and not a word on our favourite subject.  O fy ‘divine Clarinda!’”  I suspect, although quite unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemption, they but used the favourite subject as a stalking-horse.  In the meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine passion.  Visits took place, and then became frequent.  Clarinda’s friends were hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself had smart attacks of conscience, but her heart had gone from her control; it was altogether his, and she “counted all things but loss—heaven excepted—that she might win and keep him.”  Burns himself was transported while in her neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat rapidly declined during an absence.  I am tempted to imagine that, womanlike, he took on the colour of his mistress’s feeling; that he could not but heat himself at the fire of her unaffected passion; but that, like one who should leave the hearth upon a winter’s night, his temperature soon fell when he was out of sight, and in a word, though he could share the symptoms, that he had never shared the disease.  At the same time, amid the fustian of the letters there are forcible and true expressions, and the love verses that he wrote upon Clarinda are among the most moving in the language.

We are approaching the solution.  In mid-winter, Jean, once more in the family way, was turned out of doors by her family; and Burns had her received and cared for in the house of a friend.  For he remained to the last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister courage to desert his victim.  About the middle of February (1788), he had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the south-west on business.  Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son.  They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour.  Burns, too late for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not have to wait.  Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful simplicity: “I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and there’s a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a little.  Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday.  She once named you, which kept me from falling asleep.  I drank your health in a glass of ale—as the lasses do at Hallowe’en—‘in to mysel’.’”  Arrived at Mauchline, Burns installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour to promise her help and countenance in the approaching confinement.  This was kind at least; but hear his expressions: “I have taken her a room; I have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given her a guinea. . . . I swore her 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.”  And then he took advantage of the situation.  To Clarinda he wrote: “I this morning called for a certain woman.  I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her;” and he accused her of “tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning.”  This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he was back in Edinburgh.  On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: “Your hopes, your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don’t mind them.  I will take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you.”  Again, on the 21st: “Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death, through death, and for ever. . . . How rich am I to have such a treasure as you! . . . ‘The Lord God knoweth,’ and, perhaps, ‘Israel he shall know,’ my love and your merit.  Adieu, Clarinda!  I am going to remember you in my prayers.”  By the 7th of April, seventeen days later he had already decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.