Robert Burns

by Gabriel Setoun

Speaking of the effect Holy Willie's Prayer had on the kirk-session, he says that they actually held three meetings to see if their holy artillery could be pointed against profane rhymers. 'Unluckily for me,' he adds, 'my idle wanderings led me on another side, point-blank within reach of their heaviest metal. This is the unfortunate story alluded to in my printed poem The Lament. 'Twas a shocking affair, which I cannot yet bear to recollect, and it had very nearly given me one or two of the principal qualifications for a place with those who have lost the chart and mistaken the reckoning of rationality.'

Throughout the year 1785 Burns had been acquainted with Jean Armour, the daughter of a master mason in Mauchline. Her name, besides being mentioned in his Epistle to Davie, is mentioned in The Vision, and we know from a verse on the six belles of Mauchline that 'Armour was the jewel o' them a'.' From the depressing cares and anxieties of that gloomy season the poet had turned to seek solace in song, but he had also found comfort and consolation in love.

'When heart-corroding care and grief
Deprive my soul of rest,
Her dear idea brings relief
And solace to my breast.'

Now in the spring of 1786 Burns as a man of honour must acknowledge Jean as his wife. The lovers had imprudently anticipated the Church's sanction to marriage, and it was his duty, speaking in the homely phrase of the Scottish peasantry, to make an honest woman of his Bonnie Jean. But, unfortunately, matters had been going from bad to worse on the farm of Mossgiel, and about this time the brothers had come to a final decision to quit the farm. Robert, as Gilbert informs us, durst not then engage with a family in his poor, unsettled state, but was anxious to shield his partner by every means in his power from the consequences of their imprudence. It was agreed, therefore, between them, that they should make a legal acknowledgment of marriage, that he should go to Jamaica to push his fortune, and that she should remain with her father till it should please Providence to put the means of supporting a family in his power. He was willing even to work as a common labourer so that he might do his duty by the woman he had already made his wife. But Jean's father, whatever were his reasons, would allow her to have nothing whatever to do with a man like Burns. A husband in Jamaica was, in his judgment, no husband at all. What inducement he held out, or what arguments he used, we may not know, but he prevailed on Jean to surrender to him the paper acknowledging the irregular marriage. This he deposited with Mr. Aitken of Ayr, who, as Burns heard, deleted the names, thus rendering the marriage null and void. This was the circumstance, what he regarded as Jean's desertion, which brought Burns, as he has said, to the verge of insanity.

Now it was that he finally resolved to leave the country. It was not the first time he had thought of America. Poverty, before this, had led him to think of emigrating; the success of others who had gone out as settlers tempted him to try his fortune beyond the seas, even though he 'should herd the buckskin kye in Virginia.' Now, imprudence as well as poverty urged him, while, wounded so sorely by the action of the Armours both in his love and his vanity, he had little desire to remain at home. There is no doubt that, prior to the birth of his twin children and the publication of his poems, he would have quitted Scotland with little reluctance. But he was so poor that, even after accepting a situation in Jamaica, he had not money to pay his passage; and it was at the suggestion of Gavin Hamilton that he began seriously to prepare for the publication of his poems by subscription, in order to raise a sum sufficient to buy his banishment. Accordingly we find him under the date April 3, 1786, writing to Mr. Aitken, 'My proposals for publishing I am just going to send to press.'

But what a time this was in the poet's life! It was a long tumult of hope and despair, exultation and despondency, poetry and love; revelry, rebellion, and remorse. Everything was excitement; calmness itself a fever. Yet through it all inspiration was ever with him, and poem followed poem with miraculous, one might almost say, unnatural rapidity. Now he is apostrophising Ruin; now he is wallowing in the mire of village scandal; now he is addressing a mountain daisy in words of tenderness and purity; now he is scarifying a garrulous tailor, and ranting with an alien flippancy; now it is Beelzebub he addresses, now the King; now he is waxing eloquent on the virtues of Scotch whisky, anon writing to a young friend in words of wisdom that might well be written on the fly-leaf of his Bible.

This was certainly a period of ageing activity in Burns's life. It seemed as if there had been a conspiracy of fate and circumstance to herald the birth of his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of a play that had all the makings of a farce and all the elements of a tragedy. There were endless complications and daily developments, all deepening the dramatic intensity without disturbing the unity. We watch with breathless interest, dumbly wondering what the end will be. It is tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and burlesque all in one.

Driven almost to madness by the faithlessness of Jean Armour, he rends himself in a whirlwind of passion, and seeks sympathy and solace in the love of Mary Campbell. What a situation for a novelist! This is just how the story-teller would have made his jilted hero act; sent him with bleeding heart to seek consolation in a new love. For novelists make a study of the vagaries of love, and know that hearts are caught in the rebound.

Most of the biographers of Burns are agreed that this Highland lassie was the object of by far the deepest passion he ever knew. They may be right. Death stepped in before disillusion, and she was never other than the adored Mary of that rapturous meeting when the white hawthorn-blossom no purer was than their love. Thus was his love for Mary Campbell ever a holy and spiritual devotion. Auguste Angellier says: 'This was the purest, the most lasting, and by far the noblest of his loves. Above all the others, many of which were more passionate, this one stands out with the chasteness of a lily. There is a complete contrast between his love for Jean and his love for Mary. In the one case all the epithets are material; here they are all moral. The praises are borrowed, not from the graces of the body, but from the features of the soul. The words which occur again and again are those of honour, of purity, of goodness. The idea of seeing her again some day was never absent from his mind. Every time he thought of eternity, of a future life, of reunions in some unknown state, it was to her that his heart went out. The love of that second Sunday of May was ever present. It was the love which led Burns to the most elevated sphere to which he ever attained; it was the inspiration of his most spiritual efforts. This sweet, blue-eyed Highland lassie was his Beatrice, and waved to him from the gates of heaven.'

We know little about Mary Campbell from the poet himself; and though much has been ferreted out about her by a host of snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, this episode in his life is still involved in mystery. It is pleasant to reflect that his reticence here has kept at least one love passage in his life sacred and holy. Is not mystery half the charm and beauty of love? Yet, in spite of his silence, or probably because of it, details have been raked up from time to time, some grey and colourless fossil-remains of what was once fresh and living fact. From Burns himself we know that the lovers took a tender farewell in a sequestered spot by the banks of the Ayr, and parted never to meet again. All the romance and tragedy are there, and what need we more? We are not even certain as to either the place or the date of her death. Mrs. Begg, the poet's sister, knew little or nothing about Mary Campbell. She remembered, however, a letter being handed in to him after the work of the season was over. 'He went to the window to open and read it, and she was struck by the look of agony which was the consequence. He went out without uttering a word.' What he felt he expressed afterwards in song—song that has become the language of bereaved and broken hearts for all time. The widowed lover knows 'the dear departed shade,' but he may not have heard of Mary Campbell.