II
EDUCATION
Robert Burns was nearly nine years old before anything revealing his personality impressed his family enough to make them remember it. Unreliable tradition has it that he was a puny infant; slightly better evidence shows him as a nervous and temperamental child, alternating between wild high spirits and moody sullenness. Once, it is said, Robert hid in a cupboard when he and his schoolmates were frolicking. The master in restoring order struck the door a resounding blow with his tawse, and the nervous shock threw the child into such uncontrollable hysterical sobs that he had to be sent home. But the most devout worshipper would have trouble in discerning a future poet in so undifferentiated an episode. It is easier to do so in Gilbert Burns’s story of what happened at Mount Oliphant one evening in 1768.
John Murdoch the schoolmaster had got a better post, and was paying a farewell visit to the parents of two of his promising pupils. As a parting gift, he brought a copy of Titus Andronicus. Beginning to read the play aloud, he soon came to the scene where her ravishers taunt the mutilated Lavinia. The children, in an agony of tears, implored him to read no more; whereupon their father dryly remarked that in that case there was no use in Murdoch’s leaving the book. Robert exclaimed fiercely that if it was left, he would burn it. Murdoch warded off the father’s rebuke by commending the display of so much sensibility, though he failed, then or later, to explain why he considered Titus Andronicus suitable reading for children. The Man of Feeling was not yet written, but ‘sensibility’ was already a word of power, and Robert Burns was already displaying the stormy emotions which were his to the grave.
Murdoch’s farewell marked the end of Burns’s elementary schooling, but the education of a boy reared as he was cannot be appraised in terms of mere schooling. If it could, the whole story might be told in a few paragraphs. Burns’s real education came from his family, from what the world taught him, and from what he taught himself. His schooling was incidental.
The poet once had the curiosity to visit the Herald’s Office in Edinburgh, only to discover that ‘Gules, Purpure, Argent, &c., quite disowned’ him—no man of his name had ever borne coat armour. The nearest he could come to it was ‘Burn’. Inquiry into his ancestry is fruitless, because nothing in his ancestry explains Burns, any more than the dull line of squires into which he was born can explain Shelley, or a London livery-stable Keats. Burns’s family produced no genius before him; it produced none after him. It is enough to record that William Burnes, the poet’s father, came of peasant stock from the eastern Lowlands of Scotland. The poet cherished the belief that some of his forebears had been out in the ’Fifteen in the train of George Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, but documentary proof is lacking. The poet’s grandfather, Robert Burnes, farmed, apparently with indifferent success, in Kincardineshire, first on the farm of Kinmonth, in Glenbervie, and later at Clochnahill, Dunnottar. Robert Burnes’s second farming venture having failed in 1747, his son William (born 1721) set out in the following year with his younger brother, Robert, to seek work.
William Burnes had had some training as a gardener, and found his first employment in Edinburgh. By 1750, however, he was in Ayrshire, where, after brief service on two other estates, he finally entered the service of Provost William Fergusson, laird of Doonholm in Alloway parish. These frequent moves were not wholly the result of unsettled labour conditions. Pride and self-assertiveness handicap the man doomed to subordination, and these traits William Burnes possessed in full measure. ‘Stubborn, ungainly Integrity’, said Burns of his father, ‘and headlong, ungovernable Irascibility are disqualifying circumstances’. William Burnes needed to be his own master, and in 1757 managed to ‘feu’ (lease in perpetuity) seven acres of land a few hundred yards north of the ruined old Kirk of Alloway.
Besides longing for a farm of his own, William Burnes wanted a wife and a home. Seven acres of market-garden, supplemented by continued part-time employment at Doonholm, made marriage possible. With his own hands he raised the rammed-clay walls of a cottage on his land—a cottage which his younger son declared, with more emphasis than the timid Gilbert usually permitted himself, to be ‘such as no family of the same rank, in the present improved style of living, would think themselves ill lodged in’. From without, the whitewashed walls and thatched roof of the ‘clay biggin’ were picturesque enough; within, it was damp, dark, and narrow, and smelly withal, for the byre and stable were under the same roof of rat-infested thatch. But such rural Scots as lived to grow up in those days were inured to dampness, smells, and vermin, and it was probably with unmixed pride that William Burnes and his wife set up housekeeping in December, 1757.
The bridegroom was ‘advanced in life’; he was in fact almost as old when he married as his famous son was when he died. His red-haired bride, twelve years his junior, was Agnes Broun of Kirkoswald. The daughter of a small farmer, she had been accustomed from childhood to the life of toil which marriage intensified. Her girlhood as housekeeper for her widowed father and manager of his younger children had given plenty of domestic training, but formal education was too great a luxury for girls; the mother of Scotland’s greatest poet was never able to write her own name. She had, however, a sort of literary education more valuable for her son than savouring at first hand the dullness of Boston’s Fourfold State could have been. Blessed with a sense of humour, a retentive memory, and a keen ear, the girl had stored her mind with a wealth of ballads, folk-songs, and country sayings which later became an integral part of her son’s thought and art. The seeds of the poet’s imagination and wit were his mother’s; William Burnes’s most conspicuous contribution to his son’s character was his fierce and prickly pride.
A little more than thirteen months after his parents’ marriage, on January 25, 1759, Robert Burns was born. The Scottish winter was doing its worst—‘a blast o’ Janwar’ win’ blew handsel in on Robin’. In other words, a few days after the poet’s birth a wild Atlantic gale tore out part of the clay gable of the cottage where it had settled unevenly round the stone jambs of the chimney. Mother and baby had to be carried through the storm to a neighbour’s house, where they sheltered until the damage could be repaired. To Burns in later years the incident seemed an augury of his own stormy life. The world had begun to educate him to its harshness almost before he knew that he was in it. Fortunately he had a father who was determined that his children should also have an education in the more conventional sense.
Though Scotland theoretically provided a free school in every parish, the usual gap separated theory and practice. Sometimes there was no school at all; often the school was an unsanitary hovel presided over by a master who was expected to live on a salary of perhaps ten or fifteen pounds a year, and who therefore was constantly driven to desperate shifts to provide for himself and his family. John Wilson of Tarbolton, for instance, the victim of ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’, tried to eke out his meagre earnings by starting a little grocery shop in his cottage, and in 1790 was ready to undertake the drudgery of a legal copyist in Edinburgh in order to better his condition. After the close of the century, when every parish was ordered by Act of Parliament to provide its schoolmaster with a house of at least two rooms, some lairds objected to erecting ‘palaces for dominies’. And even when a parish had a decent schoolhouse and a competent teacher, bad roads and lack of conveyance often made it impossible for children from outlying farms to reach it.
When William Burnes built his cottage at Alloway the fact that there was no school nearer than Ayr would scarcely have worried him. His own book-learning was sketchy, his writing cramped and laborious, though his speech was more precise and ‘better English’ than that of most of his neighbours. But he was devoutly religious, and cherished the sound Presbyterian conviction that first-hand acquaintance with the Scriptures was essential to knowledge in this world and salvation in the next. By the time his eldest son was six years old the father, conscious of his own inadequacy as a teacher, arranged with half a dozen neighbours to hire a master of their own. Their choice fell on John Murdoch, a solemn and pedantic youth of eighteen, who in mentality somewhat resembled Ichabod Crane. For wages of about sixpence a day and his board—which meant a share of the oatmeal and kail and part of a bed in each crowded cottage in turn—Murdoch undertook to instruct his charges, not without tears, in the three R’s and also in such elementary music as would enable them to sing the Psalms of David in metre at family worship.
In this latter accomplishment he found Robert Burns, who in manhood was able to remember and distinguish in all their subtle variations hundreds of folk melodies, an almost hopeless pupil with a harsh and untuneable voice. At the task of beating into the future poet the elements of spelling, grammar, and syntax he was more successful. Instruction in reading was based largely on a volume of extracts compiled by another Scottish schoolmaster named Arthur Masson—good enough literature for the most part, but too declamatory to be really within the grasp of a six- or seven-year-old intelligence. Robert’s first conscious realization of poetic experience came from Addison’s hymn, ‘How are Thy servants blest, O Lord’: he also memorized the ‘Fall of Cardinal Wolsey’ and other set pieces so thoroughly that throughout his life their phrases came unbidden from his pen. If Murdoch found difficulty in making the children understand the poetic merits of Hamlet’s soliloquies or of long passages from Home’s Tragedy of Douglas, he at least convinced some of them that poetry had meaning. One of his favourite exercises was making them paraphrase poetry into straight-forward prose—a device which his most famous pupil subsequently employed in exposing bad grammar in a female admirer’s verses.
Murdoch was not the man to set a poetic child’s imagination on fire, and since he applied the usual schoolmasterly standard of judging the pupils according to their docility, it is hardly surprising that he found the timid and gentle Gilbert a more promising lad than his brother. In any case, Murdoch’s service was too brief to have much permanent influence on Burns’s mind. Before the master had completed his tenure of about two years and a half at Alloway, William Burnes had removed to Mount Oliphant farm, separated from the school by two miles of sodden road which must have made regular attendance difficult, and sometimes impossible. Yet the master retained a sort of puzzled affection for the boy whom he was too prosaic to understand, and Burns reciprocated the feeling with real respect and esteem. Murdoch, in the schoolroom and in the long evenings in what he called the argillaceous fabric or mud domicile at Alloway, had at least impressed the lesson that books had meaning and that words should be used with precision. That Burns in later life never had any difficulty in saying precisely what he meant, he probably owed at root to Murdoch’s severe drill; that his style of saying it was frequently much too formal he likewise owed to the dominie and to the prose selections of Arthur Masson.
The earliest stages of book education are seldom important in shaping the maturity of the learner. They only furnish him with a few tools which he may later apply in his own way to his own ends. But with Burns the whole pressure of his formal education was all his life in direct conflict with his instinctive preferences. For John Murdoch, as for Arthur Masson, Scottish vernacular literature did not exist. Scottish writers like James Thomson and John Home, who had made reputations in England by writing in standard English, were admired to the far side of idolatry, but for Scottish youths, as for English, Pope was the model for poetry; the Tatler and Spectator for prose. Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden were the only writers earlier than 1700 who were widely read and unreservedly admired, though the beginnings of romanticism were evoking some lip-service to Spenser. If Chaucer was read at all, it was in the modernizations and imitations of Dryden, Pope, and Prior; the Elizabethan and Caroline lyrists were safe sources for newspaper poets to steal from, as Sterne stole from Burton. By modern standards, the amount of native literature needed in order to appear well-read was limited, but its very limitation intensified its pressure. Poverty kept Burns from the influence, for good or ill, of the classics; nothing could preserve anyone, who read at all, from the influence of the neo-classics. Outside the door the rich vernacular literature of Scotland was still vigorously alive, but no schoolmaster in Burns’s boyhood would have dreamed of letting it in.
This literature, indeed, was being steadily thrust further out of the cultivated world. Two years before the poet’s father was born, Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw had written the ballad fragment of ‘Hardyknute’ with genuine folk skill; in the next generation such interest as remained was contaminated with literary sophistication. The gentlefolk of William Burnes’s generation could no longer write true ballads, but they could and did write true folk-songs, as witness Jean Elliot’s ‘Flowers of the Forest’, Alison Cockburn’s ‘I’ve seen the smiling of Fortune beguiling’, and John Skinner’s ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John o’ Badenyon’. The gentlefolk of Robert Burns’s generation had lost this power too. Burns was six years old when Percy’s Reliques inaugurated the serious study of popular literature and let loose the spate of forgery and imitation of which Macpherson’s Ossian was the most brilliant success. The national will to believe in Macpherson’s fabrication was proof alike against the scorn of Dr. Johnson and the learning of antiquaries. To many Scots besides Burns Ossian was the ‘prince of poets’, to be read and admired as a patriotic duty, even if few of his vague and turgid phrases could be remembered long enough to quote. And what Macpherson did on the grand scale ballad ‘editors’ like John Pinkerton were doing on a small one, debasing even their genuine material with sentimental trash which blinded many readers to the merits of a really honest and accurate editor like David Herd.
But all this activity, alike of forgery and of honest collecting, never touched Burns in his formative years. In the boy’s world the folk literature which David Herd was recording was still alive. It is a favourite fallacy of the half-educated to identify book-learning with education. The things which made the mind and the art of Burns did not come from John Murdoch, but from people whom Murdoch no doubt patronized in his most schoolmasterful style. Agnes Broun was illiterate, but she was not ignorant. Like most intelligent illiterates, she had cultivated her memory, storing it with the pithy sayings which sum up generations of folk experience, and with the words and music of scores of old songs and ballads. These simple rhythms, sung as she went about her work, sank into her son’s mind without his knowing it. Years afterwards some chance association would recall an old line or stanza of his mother’s to supply the ‘starting note’ for a song of his own. And her repertoire was powerfully supplemented by old Betty Davidson’s, who ‘had the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery’. To these tales, listened to with delighted shudders, he ascribed the first awakening of his imagination, even though some of them scared him so thoroughly that their effect stayed with him into manhood. No doubt many a gentleman’s son heard similar stories from nurses and servants, but formal classical education effectually smothered any idea of putting them to literary use. Sir Walter Scott was almost the first child of the upper ranks to realize his folk-heritage, and probably he owed much of his freedom to do so to the interruption of his scholastic training. Ill-health saved him from formalism, as poverty saved Burns.
Burns’s acquaintance with popular and traditional literature was not, however, limited to what he heard at home. The eighteenth century was the heyday of the chapbook and the broadside—forms of popular literature resulting from the spread of literacy among the middle and lower classes, which were finally swept away by the newspaper. In Burns’s childhood every peddler’s pack contained an assortment ranging from topical songs and reports of the death and dying words of the latest criminal to abridgements of old histories and romances. Even the poorest labourer could afford the penny or two these publications cost, and they passed from hand to hand until they were worn out. William Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s modernization of Blind Harry’s History of Sir William Wallace, which so roused Burns’s boyish patriotism, may have reached the lad in chapbook form; the Life of Hannibal which he also mentions was almost certainly a chapbook; he was familiar from his earliest years with such ephemera as ‘The Aberdeen Almanac’ and ‘Six Excellent New Songs’. But he nowhere mentions another group of writings which he assuredly read.
Only a few years before Burns was born, Dugal Graham, the hunchbacked bellman of Glasgow, began publishing a series of Scottish chapbooks. Their popularity was enormous; total sales are alleged to have run into the hundreds of thousands. The most pretentious of Graham’s works was a metrical history of the ’45; the most characteristic were the humorous prose tales such as ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, ‘The Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman’, and ‘The Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork’. These chaps were made up of traditional anecdotes of a broadly comic sort, loosely strung together but supplied by Graham with the local colour of Scottish peasant life. Much of Graham’s material had a long history; coarse jests which go back at least as far as Chaucer; folk-tales of unquenchable vitality, such as the one on which Synge long afterwards based The Shadow of the Glen; quaint figures of speech and wild exaggerations, some of which crossed the Atlantic to become the progenitors of the American ‘tall story’. The peasant world as Graham depicted it was tough and crude and unlovely, but full of a coarse vitality which enlivened even the baldest passages of Graham’s prose and which at its best expressed itself in pungent phrases remembered and used by Burns, probably long after he had forgotten their source. The most indecorous stanza in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ is based on a phrase from ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, as is a similar stanza in ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’.
But the peasant life of Scotland, however squalid its physical circumstances as Dugal Graham portrayed them, had a variety of interest unknown to the modern dweller in a city slum. When the technique of all the varied crafts necessary to rural life had to be learned by example and oral tradition, the whole process of living was an education. Almost as soon as they were able to walk the children began to take their part in the work of the farm. At the age of six or thereabouts the boys would be helping to guide the four-horse team which dragged the clumsy plough; not long afterwards they began to share in reaping, threshing, and winnowing, besides doing the innumerable and endless small chores of the farm. These tasks, with all their accompanying observations of plants and animals, of weather and seasons, were stronger influences on Burns than John Murdoch was. No poet has revealed a closer or more accurate knowledge of nature; no poet, it may be added, had less of romantic enthusiasm for pure scenery. Burns knew nature as the peasant and the savage knows it, as something on which his health and prosperity and his very life depend. Readers who are surprised that Burns spent much of his youth in sight of the noble peaks of Arran without ever mentioning them in his verse simply fail to understand the realism of the peasant’s point of view. It was not the dalesmen who won a hard living from valley farms or kept their sheep on the bleak mountainsides who found the poetry in the Lake District. Had Burns been reared on Loch Lomond or at Aberfoyle it would have made no difference; he would have been too busy trying to wring a living from the soil to note the scenery. That had to wait for Sir Walter Scott, who had nothing to do but admire it. Even when he had won fame and had consciously accepted his vocation as a national poet Burns paid only lip-service to scenery as scenery. For him it was merely background for human figures, preferably female. The spots which really stirred his emotions were those with associations of history or song—Cawdor Castle, the field of Bannockburn, Elibanks and Elibraes, the Bush aboon Traquair. And the fact that so many of the folk-songs of Scotland celebrate the streams whose valleys were the only fertile spots may have fostered the love for running water repeatedly expressed in his poetry, as it certainly roused him to do for the streams of Ayrshire what his anonymous forerunners had done for the streams of the Border.
Not all the boy’s education, however, was thus casual and informal. When his removal from Alloway to Mount Oliphant made it impossible for his sons to continue regular schooling William Burnes procured a few textbooks such as Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar and Stackhouse’s History of the Bible for their instruction. Despite the burden of farm work the father managed at times to set regular lessons to be conned at evening by the light of the kitchen fire or a tallow dip. Robert and Gilbert helped to teach their younger brothers and sisters to read and write; their own lessons included the use of a brief religious catechism which their father had himself prepared with Murdoch’s help, for William Burnes was a devout man. Even in boyhood Burns, said Gilbert, was a reader when he could get books. He read whatever he could get his hands on, however dull or ponderous it might be, from theology to poetry. His own lists in his autobiography, highly selective though they are, are proof enough. His first knowledge of classical mythology, for instance, came from Andrew Tooke’s Pantheon, an appallingly dull and didactic outline of Greek and Roman religion. He never had Keats’s good fortune in discovering the Elizabethans: his Homer was Pope’s and not Chapman’s. But he reached manhood with a working knowledge of history and geography, a keen interest in current affairs, and an acquaintance with literature which, though spotty, was the more detailed because of its relatively narrow limits.
William Burnes’s effort to educate his children at home was part of a family struggle which became one of the strongest influences in forming his son’s character. The usual destiny of the children in a peasant family was to be hired out at the age of ten or twelve as farm servants. This fate, with its breaking of ties, cessation of schooling, and frequent moral danger, William Burnes was determined to avoid if possible. He was a stern father, but an affectionate one. John Murdoch remembered his wrath at a labourer’s ‘smutty innuendoes’, and his children knew that carelessness in word or deed would be sharply rebuked. But they likewise remembered many acts of wordless affection, as when during a thunderstorm the father came to sit with his daughter Agnes because he knew she would be frightened.
When it became evident that the few acres at Alloway could not continue to support his growing family, William Burnes rented from his old employer, Provost Fergusson, the larger farm of Mount Oliphant. Gilbert Burns, who seldom used superlatives, declared that Mount Oliphant was almost the poorest land he had ever seen in cultivation. Yet for its seventy bleak and stony acres William Burnes undertook to pay £40 a year for the first six years of his lease, and £45 for the next six. It may not be too uncharitable to assume that the Provost saw in the tenancy of the stubbornly independent Burnes a chance to get a poor farm raised to a better level of cultivation. At any rate he showed his confidence in his tenant by advancing a hundred pounds towards stocking the place. Without this help the venture would probably have been impossible; nevertheless it saddled the family with an additional load of debt. The weight of the burden can be realized from the fact that in the 1770’s in nearby Clydesdale twopence a dozen was a fair price for eggs, and chickens sold for sixpence a pair. Despite all handicaps, however, things went fairly well for the first half of the lease. In 1771 the family failed to take advantage of their privilege of relinquishing the farm, and accordingly were committed to another six years at an increased rental. Then began the series of disasters which ultimately killed William Burnes and permanently undermined the health of his eldest son.
Just at the onset of these dark days William Burnes, vexed at his children’s bad handwriting, managed to send Robert and Gilbert, turn about, to Dalrymple parish school for instruction in penmanship and grammar, that they might be better qualified to teach their brothers and sisters. By the following summer (1773), John Murdoch had returned to Ayr and Robert was spared from the farm for three weeks’ additional tutoring. The lad clutched at the opportunity like a famished man at food. He was with Murdoch ‘day and night, in school, at all meals, and in all [his] walks’. At the end of the first week, Murdoch says, ‘I told him, that as he was now pretty much master of the parts of speech, &c., I should like to teach him something of French pronunciation; ... and immediately we attacked the French with great courage. Now, there was little else to be heard but the declension of nouns, the conjugation of verbs, &c. When walking together, and even at meals, I was constantly telling him the names of different objects, ... so that he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases. In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching, that it was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in the business; and about the end of the second week of our study of the French, we began to read a little of the Adventures of Telemachus in Fénelon’s own words.’ How much French Murdoch really knew is doubtful, though he later undertook to teach it in London, and apparently secured some pupils until the Revolution filled the city with refugees who captured the market. Burns ultimately acquired a reading knowledge of the language, but if his riming ‘respectueuse’ with ‘Susie’ is a specimen of the pronunciation Murdoch taught he would scarcely have made himself understood in Paris.
Murdoch was this time most favourably impressed by Robert’s ability, and, in his own inimitable language, regretted that at the approach of harvest ‘Robert was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of Calypso, and, armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising himself in the fields of Ceres; and so he did, for although but about fifteen, I was told that he performed the work of a man.’ Murdoch had seen no signs of the qualities which Burns afterwards declared made him as a child by no means a favourite with anybody; in his eagerness for learning he displayed only the retentive memory and the enthusiastic ardour which would have most endeared him to the pedantic master. The ‘stubborn ungainly something’ which later ripened into pride was filling him with smothered rebellion against his lot in life; the weeks with Murdoch opened for a moment a door through which it seemed that he might escape. He was becoming class-conscious, and was developing a hatred of stupid wealth and power which never left him. His earliest associations with the sons of the gentry had not been unpleasant, for these lads had not yet acquired ‘a just sense of the immense distance between them and their ragged Playfellows’. ‘My young superiours’, he said, ‘never insulted the clouterly appearance of my ploughboy carcass, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons.’ They gave him stray volumes of books; one lad even helped him with his French. Nevertheless, he could remember in manhood how as a mere child he almost choked with rage in church one Sunday at the sight of a pretty servant-lass being compelled to leave her pew to make room for the stupid son of her employer.
About the time of his last association with Murdoch he began to have occasions for rage without going to church for them. Provost Fergusson died in 1771, and the administration of his property fell into the hands of a steward or factor. Fergusson had probably been lenient if his tenant could not make payment in full on each quarter-day, but it was the factor’s business to get in the rents, and if they were not paid he wrote threatening letters to demand them. It is always difficult for a debtor to see things from the creditor’s point of view; for Robert Burns it was impossible. For him the factor was a scoundrel, and his dunning letters were deliberate efforts to humiliate the unfortunates in his power. Not but what the Burnes family had reason for feeling resentful. They were doing everything that was humanly possible, and more than was wise, to meet the factor’s demands. They lived very poorly, even by Scottish peasant standards; meat was almost unknown on their table; they gave up all hired help. At the age of fourteen, as Murdoch noted, Burns was doing a man’s work, guiding the clumsy plough, flailing out grain by hand, and performing all the other tasks at which brute strength had to serve not merely instead of machinery but instead of well-made tools. His gait became the clumsy tread of the ploughman; his young shoulders developed a permanent stoop from handling the awkward plough-stilts. But the worst physical effect was invisible. The adolescent boy doing a man’s work on insufficient food was incurably injuring his heart. When the lesion began to manifest itself in dizziness and faintness Robert was not sent to a doctor. Probably it would have made no difference if he had been, for the trouble could scarcely have been diagnosed without a stethoscope. Instead he used heroic measures which must have aggravated the ailment. At one time he kept a tub of water beside his bed, and when faintness came on him in the night he would take a cold plunge. All his life he was plagued with fits of depression which he described by the fashionable term, hypochondria. His heart lesion intensified the nervous instability he had shown as a child, and thereby contributed to the perennially reckless conduct of his manhood. In all his life, as in his death, he continued to pay the heaviest share of the price of his father’s struggle to hold on at Mount Oliphant.
A boy seldom realizes that he is overstraining himself. What irked Burns at the time, far more than ‘the unceasing moil of a galley-slave’, was the fact that he was almost wholly cut off from social intercourse. Burns may not have been wholly an extrovert, but he needed society as an outlet for his high spirits and as a refuge from his low ones. In his earlier boyhood he had found friends both among schoolfellows of his own rank and among the sons of neighbouring gentlemen. At Mount Oliphant he was cut off. Murdoch would come out on his half-holidays, ‘with one or two persons more intelligent than [himself], that good William Burnes might enjoy a mental feast’. This conversation of ‘solid reason, sensible remark, and a moderate seasoning of jocularity’ was not what the boy needed. Robert and Gilbert ‘began to talk and reason like men, much sooner than their neighbours’, but this precocious maturity only made the lad more acutely conscious of his own lack of advantages. He envied the greater ease and assurance of his more fortunate fellows, and out of this envy and self-consciousness grew the aggressive manner upon which some of the gentry later remarked with disfavour.
As William Burnes’s tenure at Mount Oliphant neared its end the clouds opened a little. The father had never wholly abandoned his hope of providing his eldest son with some sort of education, and in the summer of 1775 managed to send him for a few weeks to learn ‘dialling and mensuration’ at Kirkoswald. Superficially the venture seemed as fruitless as the earlier effort to learn French in three weeks. The master, Hugh Rodger, was as pedantic as Murdoch, but inclined to be harsh and sarcastic where Murdoch was earnest and encouraging. Though Burns acquired some practical mathematics which later proved useful in his Excise work, he found the more vivid part of his education outside the classroom. With William Niven, a classmate of his own age, he indulged in spirited impromptu debates on such adolescent topics as ‘Whether is a great general or a respectable merchant the most valuable member of society?’ With a girl named Peggy Thomson he fell in love briefly, but so violently as to disorganize his work during his last days at school. Above all, he got glimpses of a sort of life very different from the seclusion of Mount Oliphant.
In the later eighteenth century smuggling rated as one of the major British industries. An excise tax of twenty shillings a gallon on spirits set an even higher premium on illicit dealing than prohibition did in the United States in the 1920’s. Few of the ‘best people’ had any more scruples about dealing with smugglers than Americans had about dealing with bootleggers. Nor was smuggling confined to liquors. Tea, French silks and laces, and other goods on which the tariff was high were also run in in quantity. The coast near Kirkoswald was a centre for landing goods intended for the Ayrshire and Glasgow markets because it was almost the last point smuggling vessels could approach without grave risk of being trapped by the revenue cutters in the narrow waters of the Firth of Clyde. Samuel Brown, the uncle with whom Burns stayed at Kirkoswald, probably had a quiet share in the business; at any rate his nephew saw plenty of smugglers. In the taverns where these men spent the profits of their successful ventures Burns witnessed roistering of a wilder sort than market nights at Ayr exhibited. His extremely limited means, however, make it improbable that he often looked unconcernedly on a large tavern bill, though ten years later he thought he had. More likely the awkward youth was a spectator, as the poet was at Poosie Nansie’s in 1785. A Shakespearian delight in the salty flavour of raw humanity was one of Burns’s life-long characteristics which first found expression at Kirkoswald. In 1783 he wrote to John Murdoch, ‘I seem to be one sent into the world, to see, and observe; and I very easily compound with the knave who tricks me of my money, if there be anything original about him which shews me human nature in a different light from anything I have seen before.’ His respectable friends often deplored what seemed to them a depraved taste for low company, but, as his best friend in Dumfries explained, it was not the lowness of the company that attracted him; his companions were of ‘low ranks, but men of talent and humour’. It was the colour of such company, its shrewdness, its reckless wit, and its unashamed gusto for life that made Burns prefer it to the drab respectability of the church-going bourgeoisie.
Crude humanity, however, was not the only thing Burns studied at Kirkoswald. He encountered some new books as well. Thomson’s Seasons introduced him to the chief Scottish poet of the century who had made his reputation by writing in standard English; Shenstone’s ‘Elegies’ and ‘The Schoolmistress’ initiated him into the poetry of sentiment, and the Spenserian stanza of the latter gave him the verse-form for ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. In reading these poets, however, he was merely extending an acquaintance already made through the specimens in Arthur Masson. His prose reading opened a different world. Novels were not to be found in the stricter Presbyterian homes, so Pamela, an odd volume of Ferdinand Count Fathom, and above all Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, were a vivid experience. Nothing in his previous training had inoculated him against the virus of sentimentality; exposed to its most extreme form, he was infected for life. This, the lad no doubt said to himself, was the way persons of superior sensitivity looked upon life; very well, he could prove that his sensibility was equal to theirs. At the first opportunity he bought a copy of The Man of Feeling and carried it with him everywhere until he wore it out.
Had Burns known more of literature and of the world he would have been able to take Mackenzie’s sentiment at the proper discount. Then the book’s influence might have been good. It might gently have corrected the harshness of his peasant background, as the literature of sentiment in general ameliorated the brutality of the eighteenth-century world. As it was, the book set up a preposterous ideal which divided Burns’s energies and sometimes vitiated his work. The crudities of peasant life needed softening and elevating, but sentimentalism made many of his efforts in this direction mawkish instead of humane. The poet who portrayed an old farmer’s affection for a faithful mare was revealing sentiment in the best sense of that much-abused word; the poet who moralized over a ploughed-under weed was pumping up emotions such as no real farmer ever felt. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that the foundations for the weakest elements in his work, as well as for the magnificent zest of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, were laid at Kirkoswald.
Burns was probably right in saying that he came home considerably improved. But he was also discontented. Mount Oliphant seemed narrower and drabber than ever after the colour of the smuggling village, and he had become acutely conscious—thanks equally to Peggy Thomson and to his tavern companions—of his own awkwardness. This consciousness led him to his first overt act of rebellion. In ‘absolute defiance’ of his father’s commands, he attended a country dancing school, to improve his manners. William Burnes’s ‘Manual of Religious Belief’ indicates a willingness to mitigate some of the sterner points of Presbyterian theology, but he was in full agreement with the Kirk’s condemnation of worldly amusements. Gilbert Burns, as well as some of his brother’s biographers, tried to explain away the remark about defiance, and the father may not have pressed the point too far when he saw that Robert’s mind was made up. Undoubtedly, however, Burns was correctly describing his own feelings at the time, and though the father sensibly accepted the accomplished fact and later allowed his other children to learn dancing he thenceforth regarded his eldest son’s conduct with suspicion and concern.
On leaving Kirkoswald Burns had undertaken to carry on a literary correspondence with some of his schoolfellows. He was bent on improving his powers of expression and acquiring a literary style. But the medium he selected was prose. Probably in retrospect he exaggerated the actual extent of this correspondence—it is hard to believe that ‘every post’ brought him as many letters as if he had been a merchant, or that he could have paid the postage if it had. The few surviving specimens are quite enough. The poet’s uncle had once set out to buy one of the manuals of letter-writing which supply models for most of the imaginable contingencies of human life; he brought home instead ‘a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Ann’s reign’. The exact volume has never been identified, though Burns’s subsequent quotations show that it included letters of Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. But the eighteenth century, until Boswell taught it better, did not publish really familiar letters. Such collections as Pope helped to bring out were really composed of brief essays. Personal opinion was subdued; personal news was deleted. The ‘unbridled effusions’ which make the charm of familiar letters were suppressed. On such unfortunate models, almost as stiff as Elizabeth Rowe’s ‘Letters Moral and Entertaining’ which he had found in his Masson, Burns set to work. The result was the same as when he encountered The Man of Feeling. A youth bred among literate people would have realized intuitively that these models showed only one side of letter-writing. Burns, with no other standards to measure them by, took them as the whole of the law and prophets, and shaped his epistolary style accordingly. His ear, attuned to the subtlest modulations of poetry, remained always deaf to the quieter graces of prose: when Dugald Stewart commended the simplicity of Franklin’s writing, Burns could see nothing in it, ‘when compared with the point, and antithesis, and quaintness of Junius.’
Those who have judged Burns adversely as a letter-writer would have still more grounds for their criticism had more letters survived like the few to William Niven and Thomas Orr. These country youths admired Burns’s solemn analyses of Pride and Courage and his exhortations to be content with poverty; so, unfortunately, did the better-educated friends of his later life. The letters which he transcribed for Lady Harriet Don in 1787 and for Robert Riddell in 1791-93 belonged to the same school of prose as his earliest epistles to Niven. Burns would never have thought of making, nor his friends of asking for, transcripts of the admirable discussions of Scottish song which he sent to George Thomson, nor of his easier letters to John Ballantine and Mrs. Dunlop. No epistolary Robert Fergusson ever came into his hands to show him the way to a conversational style. When he wrote easy prose it was in spite of his models and because he had something to say which really demanded saying.
When the family at last escaped from Mount Oliphant in 1777 Burns was eighteen, the age at which Chatterton, seven years before, had taken his own life. But Burns’s self-education was a much slower process than Chatterton’s. At eighteen he was still an awkward rustic, with all his intellectual and artistic powers still to find. The most positive result of the long ordeal at Mount Oliphant—apart from its injuries to his health—had been the building up of a strong sense of family loyalty. William Burnes had made every sacrifice to keep his family together, and the feeling that this was a primary obligation had been deeply impressed on his son. For the moment their prospects seemed hopeful. The father had managed to lease the larger farm of Lochlie near Tarbolton, and had again obtained from his landlord a cash advance for stock and improvements. But again Burnes was paying the penalty of his desperately independent character. For Lochlie’s hundred and thirty acres of sour clay—so sour that the lease provided for two separate applications of lime at the rate of 400 bushels to an acre—its putative owner, David M’Lure, set a rental of £130. It was a ruinous bargain which broke William Burnes’s spirit, helped to kill him, and gave his children some first-hand acquaintance with the chicanery of the law.
On Burns the first effect of the removal to Lochlie was social. The farm was within easy reach of Tarbolton village, where he found the companionship his nature craved. Of his friends at Mount Oliphant James Candlish’s is the only name that has not perished; those of the Tarbolton cronies are enshrined in both verse and prose. For the first couple of years the records are almost blank. By his own testimony, and Gilbert’s, he was constantly falling tempestuously in love, usually with girls of his own rank, or below it, for ‘he had always a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or who had more consequence in life’. His imagination could always endow any girl to whom he was attracted with a plentiful stock of charms which bystanders often failed to perceive. His ready pen, moreover, was constantly at the service of his less fluent friends who sought his aid in composing their love-letters, and he ‘felt as much pleasure at being in the secret of half the amours in the parish, as ever did Premier at knowing the intrigues of half the courts of Europe.’ But Gilbert’s testimony corroborates his own statement that none of these early affairs passed the bounds of decorum. The fervours which he had first experienced when reaping with Nellie Kilpatrick at the age of fifteen were growing stronger and more clearly defined, but they were still adolescent.
This adolescent Burns figures also in the proceedings of the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, a social and debating society which he and a few friends organized in the autumn of 1780. Its fragmentary records show the youths arguing such windy topics as Burns had discussed with Niven five years before, but with a more direct application to his own walk of life. E. g., ‘Whether is the savage man or the peasant of a civilized country, in the most happy situation?’ ‘Whether is a young man of the lower ranks of life likeliest to be happy who has got a good education, and his mind well informed, or he who has just the education and information of those around him?’ ‘Whether between friends, who have no reason to doubt each other’s friendship, there should be any reserve?’ Such topics point to Burns as their propounder, as do some of the Club’s rules. The one which barred religious topics was doubtless in the interest of peace, but Burns’s hand is evident in the tenth and last:
‘Every man proper for a member of this society must have a frank, honest, open heart; above anything dirty or mean; and must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex. No haughty, self-conceited person, who looks upon himself as superior to the rest of the club, and especially no mean-spirited, worldly mortal, whose only will is to heap up money, shall on any pretence whatever be admitted....’
Indecorum of language was likewise barred, and clerical biographers in discussing these rules have left the impression that the Club was a kind of Y.M.C.A. From what we know of peasant life in Scotland and of the adolescent male everywhere, it is possible that the biographers were mistaken. Whatever his conduct in 1780, Burns was soon applying the tenth rule in no platonic or idealistic sense.
Nevertheless the Club played an important part in developing his powers. Besides giving him an audience for his ideas it showed him that he could dominate his audience. Thenceforward Burns took the lead in any social group where he was intimate; his companions, re-echoing his wit, believed that they shared it and even convinced him that they did. The roster of his friends includes many wholly commonplace people like John Richmond and Robert Ainslie who shone only by reflected light, but whose satellite nature Burns was quite unaware of at the time. Moreover, the Club gave him almost his first experience of the wine of applause, and he found it a heady vintage.
Among the Tarbolton Bachelors was David Sillar—not a charter member of the Club, but admitted to it early in 1781. A year younger than Burns, Sillar, under his friend’s inspiration, produced a few commonplace poems which gave Burns the excuse for hailing him as brother poet. Sillar had a certain gift for characterization in prose; he described Tarbolton townsfolk as ‘uncontaminated by reading, conversation, or reflection’, and left the most vivid extant picture of Burns on the threshold of manhood. Burns was beginning to reveal the playboy elements in his nature—that desire above all things to be conspicuous which he shared with such very different geniuses as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Bernard Shaw. In a day when strict Presbyterians still cropped their hair, after the fashion which in the previous century had earned them the name of Roundheads, Burns let his grow long and wore it in a queue—‘the only tied hair in the parish’. When everyone else was wearing plaids of ordinary shepherd’s gray, Burns sported one of dead-leaf colour. And since the uncontaminated parishioners of Tarbolton were orthodox Old Lights Burns acquired easy notoriety by setting up as a heretic.
Throughout his life Burns managed always to acquire a maximum of ill-repute with a minimum of actual transgression. It was not so much that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously. Sometimes the conspicuousness was mere ill-luck. A fair portion, for instance, of the Edinburgh gossip which clung to his name may well have originated in the fact that both the servant girls with whom he had relations in the city brought legal action against him—a consequence he could scarcely have foreseen. On the other hand, his desire to startle the parish frequently bore fruit in suspicions and enmities impossible to live down. G. K. Chesterton once advised the village genius who wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile and also very strong, not to come up to London but to stay at home and have a row with the rector. This was precisely what Burns did. The New Light doctrines which soft-pedalled such Calvinistic dogmas as predestination had already conquered Edinburgh and Glasgow and were beginning to invade the provinces. In any case Burns’s saturation in the sentimentalism of Mackenzie and Sterne would have made him receptive to the New Light emphasis on Benevolence and the Moral Sense. But when the congeniality of the new doctrines was joined with an opportunity to startle his neighbours the combination was irresistible. He began, he says, to debate theology with such heat and indiscretion as to raise a cry of heresy which persisted in Tarbolton and Mauchline as long as he remained there. An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, pictures him in the kirkyard between services, expounding heretical doctrines with such vigour as to elicit hisses and cries of ‘Shame!’ from his auditors. At least the story is true in spirit. Burns was determined to be conspicuous, even if it meant hisses instead of applause.
Masonic affiliations, which after his return from Irvine supplanted the Bachelors’ Club, gave him still another chance to indulge both his social instincts and his sympathies with liberal thought. A rural lodge like St. James’s at Tarbolton was, to be sure, no such centre of political liberalism as were the Masonic lodges of the Continent during the later eighteenth century. The chief activity, in fact, of most of the Scottish lodges seems to have been convivial, with the additional feature, lacking in the ordinary social club, that the members were pledged to help their fellows in sickness or distress. Nevertheless the knowledge that brother Masons in England and abroad were disseminating ideas which challenged absolutism in government and religion must have reached even village youths in Tarbolton. In Scotland, moreover, the ritual which dignified the childish thrill of membership in a secret organization gave Freemasonry an emotional appeal which the drab services of the Kirk and the narrow routine of every day lacked. From the time when he joined St. James’s Lodge, about 1782, until after his sojourn in Edinburgh, Burns took his Masonic duties with the utmost seriousness. He helped to put the struggling and almost bankrupt lodge on its feet; from 1784 to 1787 he was its Depute Master. In Edinburgh he continued his affiliations, and perhaps the highest moment of all his early triumphal progress in the capital came at the meeting of the Grand Lodge of Scotland on January 13, 1787, when the Grand Master gave the toast, ‘Caledonia, and Caledonia’s Bard, brother Burns!’ It is idle to conjecture if the coolness which followed his first acclaim in Edinburgh reached into Masonic circles; certainly the poet’s interest in the craft waned in his later years. His letters from Ellisland and Dumfries scarcely mention it, except when he was in trouble and wanted Robert Graham to help him as a Mason as well as a friend. He duly affiliated himself with the Dumfries lodge, and became its Senior Warden, but if silence means anything the zest was gone.
The Masonic fellowship of course was male, but Burns was not forgetting his obligations as a member of the Bachelors’ Club. His own statements and Gilbert’s, already quoted, show a succession of passing infatuations with various girls whose names, even, are doubtful, and of whose personalities the most ardent legend-mongers can scarcely summon up a wraith. By comparison with such shadows as Anne Rankine and Mary Morison, even Nellie Kilpatrick who stirred the poet’s blood for a single harvest, and Peggy Thomson, who overset his trigonometry at Kirkoswald, are three-dimensional. The one figure who half emerges from the shadows is Alison (or Ellison) Begbie. Burns met her in 1780 or 1781, but understanding of the matter is not clarified by the possibility that some of the five letters supposed to have been addressed to her may really be drafts of the love-letters he frequently wrote for his friends. Assuming them all to be Alison’s, they prove mainly that Burns had not yet learned much about women. If ever farm-lass was wooed in such stilted and temperate phrases it is pretty certain that she was not in this humour won. Burns’s intentions were serious; he wanted to marry Alison. Unfortunately the intentions made him serious too. He seemed afraid to commit himself in writing. A bystander is not surprised that Alison refused the man who told her that her company never gave him those giddy raptures so much talked of among lovers, and who announced that in his opinion married life was only friendship in a more exalted degree. It did surprise Burns. Indeed the shock of it led him subsequently to charge her with having jilted him, a difficult feat when his own letters prove she had never accepted him. No doubt she had merely employed the ancient technique of mild and noncommittal encouragement while she was making up her mind. Burns had prided himself on his skill in letter-writing and on his address with women. To be flatly rejected the first time he made a serious proposal upset him for several months. It also completed his sentimental education. Thereafter, until he met Clarinda, he knew better than to do his courting by post.
But friendships with men and women, though they helped him momentarily to escape his blue devils, could not obscure the problem of his own and his family’s future. He still lacked an aim. Conscious of more than average powers in himself, he had no purpose to which to direct them. Moreover, the years at Lochlie were bringing him for the first time to a realization of the workings of the larger economic laws. The American War was ruining the West of Scotland. Half its market for manufactured goods was closed; its exports to the West Indies were being raided by American privateers. Just before the war an over-expanded bank had failed, dragging down with it half the gentlemen in Ayrshire and leaving a trail of wreckage which was not wholly obliterated for a couple of decades. Even the wartime demand for farm produce was no help when multitudes of jobless artisans could not pay the high prices which at best would scarcely have yielded a fair return on the over-capitalized land. M’Lure, the landlord of Lochlie, was heavily mortgaged to the defunct bank. Hard pressed for cash, he tried to extort from his tenants more than was his due. William Burnes resisted, and became involved in litigation which followed him to the grave. In similar circumstances at Mount Oliphant Burns had seen merely a personal situation in which a villainous factor was demanding more rent than the family could pay. Now he began to realize that a man may be frugal and diligent in his business, and yet be destroyed by forces which he did not start and was powerless to control.
As early as 1780 Burns had experimented at growing flax of his own on a few acres of land subleased from his father; later he won a prize for his seed. His success led him in 1781 to go to Irvine to learn the trade of flax-dressing. Some consequences of that venture belong in the next chapter; educationally the results, like those of so many youthful experiences, were mainly negative. His distaste for the work, and its ill effect on his health, left him more aimless than before. He concluded that he was unfit for the world of business, and where he had formerly yearned for some chance of advancement he now decided that he was destined to be only a looker-on at life. All that restrained him from complete shiftlessness was his sense of responsibility for his family.
Intellectually, that sense was keener and more insistent than ever, but now for the first time it was in direct conflict with a storm of emotions. Burns had come home empty-handed as the prodigal, to find his father visibly sinking under the united effects of worry and tuberculosis. It was plain that even if his contest with his landlord should be decided in his favour he would never be fit to undertake another farm. By the beginning of 1783 the whole family, including William Burnes, realized that death was at best a matter of months. M’Lure the landlord realized it too, and such scenes as had accompanied the reading of the factor’s letters at Mount Oliphant were re-enacted at Lochlie with triple poignance. The children were old enough this time to understand the whole meaning of the affair; their father was a broken man, and where the factor had merely threatened legal action, M’Lure was taking it. The outcome of the case and the practical means whereby Gavin Hamilton helped the family through the crisis will be told later; its emotional impact on Burns himself, coming as it did on the heels of his own failure at business, could hardly be overstated. He saw his father’s lifetime of struggle for independence ending in defeat and despair. Recollection of Mount Oliphant and Lochlie never ceased to haunt his own ventures as a farmer, and helped to damn them. Fear and hatred of one’s economic position are seldom the heralds of success.
Burns’s whole nature, in fact, was beginning to cry out against the life he was expected to lead. Not even the loyally accepted burden laid upon him from his father’s weakening hands could hold him steady. He had come back from Irvine, as before from Kirkoswald, incapable of fitting again into the narrow pattern of the life he had lived before his departure. He had outgrown his mould. The dying father noted with concern that his son was spending longer hours with wilder companions, and displaying a new aggressiveness and assurance in his manner of speaking with women. Nevertheless the shadow of the old man’s authority was still enough, when reinforced by the desperate need of securing the future of the family, to inhibit the full expression of the new tendencies. Gilbert’s testimony is explicit. At Lochlie he and Robert were both allowed the usual labourer’s wage of £7 a year, against which was charged the value of every piece of clothing manufactured at home. Neither there nor at Mossgiel did Robert’s expenditures exceed this frugal sum. It was extravagance of emotion, of speech and conduct, not of expense, that beset the poet.
On his deathbed, on February 13, 1784, William Burnes muttered that there was one member of his family for whose future conduct he feared, and Robert, in tears, took the admonition to himself. Hardly was the family settled at Mossgiel, after some strictly legal dodging which must have increased the poet’s inward distaste for the whole business, when the traits his father had dreaded began their full play. Though he entered on his responsibilities as head of the family with the best of resolutions, his heart was not in the undertaking. He read farming books, calculated crops, and attended markets, but his mind was elsewhere. According to his own account, he lost interest in the work because of two successive crop-failures, the first owing to bad seed and the second to a wet harvest. But this was an excuse, not an explanation. The real reasons lay within himself. They were his passions and his art.
His father’s death had removed the last check upon social indulgence. Always shunning the solitude which produced brooding melancholy, he had found in Mauchline a new and gayer set of cronies whose company was more congenial than that of his family in the crowded cottage at Mossgiel. More and more of his time was spent in the village taverns—not for drunkenness, but for the pleasure of sharing the hilarity of careless youths and the uninhibited wit of older ‘men of talent and humour’ like his neighbour John Rankine. The rigidly righteous began to frown on the young farmer whose reckless sallies were sure to provoke the wildest outbursts of laughter. And even at Mossgiel there were distractions from a sober and godly life. The household included a young servant-lass named Betty Paton, whose charms, like those of most of Burns’s sweethearts, were mainly physical. Within a few months of his father’s death Betty became Burns’s mistress, and in May, 1785, bore his first child amid all the accompaniments of a public scandal in the parish.
Unpropitious though such beginnings were for a career as a tenant farmer, they were relatively unimportant compared with the inner compulsions arising from his discovery of his poetic vocation. Many another young farmer had sowed his wild oats and then settled down to rear a legitimate family and become an elder in the Kirk. For Burns such a future had really ceased to be possible even before he left Lochlie. In April, 1783, under the melancholy influence of his own ill-health and his father’s dark prospects, he had begun to keep a commonplace book with the avowed intention of some day showing the world that a young ploughman, little indebted to scholastic education, was nevertheless capable of rime and reason. When he started the book his literary models were Shenstone, Mackenzie, and the folk-songs of his country. At some time during the next year, however, the poems of Robert Fergusson came into his hands. They roused him as Chapman’s Homer roused Keats. For the first time he realized that the Scottish dialect might be something more than a dying relic of the past. He had been long acquainted with Allan Ramsay, but Ramsay belonged to the primitive age before Scottish letters had been ennobled by such geniuses as Henry Mackenzie, James Beattie, and John Home. Now he found that Fergusson, only ten years older than himself, had returned to the speech and the verse-forms of Ramsay. And Fergusson was no country boy but an educated lawyer’s clerk bred in the Athens of the North. Reading these poems Burns realized their vivid descriptions and their wit—realized also that what Fergusson had done he could do as well, or better. Mauchline parish offered as many themes for homely satire as Edinburgh did.
The theme ready to hand was ecclesiastical controversy. The neighbourhood was ululating with disputes between Old Lights and New Lights, and the leaders on both sides were behaving with the lack of charity peculiar to Christians on the war-path. Moreover, Burns’s landlord and friend, Gavin Hamilton, was in the thick of it, standing trial before the Kirk Session on a charge of Sabbath-breaking. Two neighbouring Old Light ministers—John Russell of Kilmarnock and Alexander Moodie of Riccarton—chose this time for a quarrel over parish boundaries, and conducted their holy row with the heat and personal invective of a heresy-hunt. Burns improved the occasion by composing ‘The Twa Herds’. Copying the poem in a disguised hand he showed it to Hamilton, remarking with studied gravity that he had no idea who the author was, but that he thought it pretty clever. Hamilton thought so too. Copies were passed from hand to hand; the New Lights, clergy as well as laity, received it with roars of applause; the Old Lights were correspondingly furious.
When Burns followed up ‘The Twa Herds’ with ‘The Holy Fair’, ‘The Ordination’, and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, the applause redoubled, and so did the enmity of the Old Lights. The man who challenges established institutions to their face needs to be sure of his own position. Burns’s indiscretion with Betty Paton not only left him wide open to counter-attack but assured him of far more unpleasant notoriety than ordinarily accompanied such lapses in peasant Scotland. It was impossible to remain in the parish without submitting to the discipline of the Kirk. Even at its mildest the ordeal of three successive penitential appearances before Mauchline congregation would have been intensely humiliating to a man as sensitively proud as Burns. But a young bachelor’s slips from grace were not usually treated very seriously except by the clergy and the Holy Willies. Had Burns been otherwise in good standing in the community he would have been able to go on much as before, but when the evidence of his breach of sexual morality was augmented by his ill-fame as a derider of the church he became, among all the more conservative members of the parish, little better than an outcast.
He may not have realized the full bitterness of the feeling against him until his repudiation by the Armours in the spring of 1786, but he realized enough. His reaction was as inevitable as the community’s had been. If he was to be an outcast he would live up to his reputation. Many of his biographers since, as well as many of his neighbours at the time, have taken at face value the blatant pride in his ill-repute which marks such poems as the ‘Epistle to John Rankine’. But this was not part of his real nature; he was simply brazening out his humiliation. The unco guid had decided that he was a dog with a bad name. He would show them that they had underestimated his capacity to shock them. That in the process he would make the parish too hot to hold him was a consideration not likely to occur to him in the full tide of his resentment.
But if his conflict with the Kirk had brought him humiliation it had also brought him the sense of power and the intoxication of applause. He had long known that his conversational wit and fire could dominate a knot of cronies. Now he had learned that he could write things which stirred both the laughter and the deeper emotions of educated men as well as of his social equals. The hostility of the Holy Willies was even more inebriating than the applause of Gavin Hamilton and his friends. Men do not hate unless they fear; the measure of his success and power was the measure of the antagonism he had aroused. The youth whose weakness it had always been to lack an aim had found one now. His education was complete. Intimate observation and experience of a small community had acquainted him with human nature, and had at last roused him to realization of his own capacities and his true vocation. His estimate of himself and his work, he later told John Moore, was pretty nearly as high in 1785 as it was two years later, after all the adulation of Edinburgh. All that he needed now was the opportunity to display his talents on a larger stage.