Burns's life was, therefore, quite full at Ellisland, too full indeed; for, towards the end of 1791, we find him disposing of the farm, and looking to the Excise alone for a livelihood. In the farm he had sunk the greater part of the profits of his Edinburgh Edition; and now it was painfully evident that the money was lost. He had worked hard enough, but he was frequently absent, and a farm thrives only under the eye of a master. On Excise business he was accustomed to ride at least two hundred miles every week, and so could have little time to give to his fields. Besides this, the soil of Ellisland had been utterly exhausted before he entered on his lease, and consequently made a miserable return for the labour expended on it. The friendly relations that had existed between him and his landlord were broken off before now; and towards the close of his stay at Ellisland Burns spoke rather bitterly of Mr. Miller's selfish kindness. Miller was, in fact, too much of a lord and master, exacting submission as well as rent from his tenants; while Burns was of too haughty a spirit to beck and bow to any man. 'The life of a farmer is,' he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, 'as a farmer paying a dear, unconscionable rent, a cursed life.... Devil take the life of reaping the fruits that others must eat!'
The poet, too, had been overworking himself, and was again subject to his attacks of hypochondria. 'I feel that horrid hypochondria pervading every atom of both body and soul. This farm has undone my enjoyment of myself. It is a ruinous affair on all hands.' In the midst of his troubles and vexations with his farm, he began to look more hopefully to the Excise, and to see in the future a life of literary ease, when he could devote himself wholly to the Muses. He had already got ranked on the list as supervisor, an appointment that he reckoned might be worth one hundred or two hundred pounds a year; and this determined him to quit the farm entirely, and to try to make a living by one profession. As farmer, exciseman, and poet he had tried too much, and even a man of his great capacity for work was bound to have succumbed under the strain. Even had the farm not proved the ruinous bargain it did, we imagine that he must have been compelled sooner or later to relinquish one of the two, either his farm or his Excise commission. Circumstances decided for him, and in December 1791 he sold by auction his stock and implements, and removed to Dumfries, 'leaving nothing at Ellisland but a putting-stone, with which he loved to exercise his strength; a memory of his musings, which can never die; and three hundred pounds of his money, sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all augured happiness.'
CHAPTER VIII
DUMFRIES
When Burns removed from Ellisland to Dumfries, he took up his abode in a small house of three apartments in the Wee Vennel. Here he stayed till Whitsunday 1793, when the family removed to a detached house of two storeys in the Mill Vennel. A mere closet nine feet square was the poet's writing-room in this house, and it was in the bedroom adjoining that he died.
The few years of his residence in Dumfries have been commonly regarded as a period of poverty and intemperance. But his intemperance has always been most religiously exaggerated, and we doubt not also that the poverty of the family at this time has been made to appear worse than it was. Burns had not a salary worthy of his great abilities, it is true, but there is good reason to believe that the family lived in comparative ease and comfort, and that there were luxuries in their home, which neither father nor mother had known in their younger days. Burns liked to see his Bonnie Jean neat and trim, and she went as braw as any wife of the town. Though we know that he wrote painfully, towards the end of his life, for the loan of paltry sums, we are to regard this as a sign more of temporary embarrassment than of a continual struggle to make ends meet. The word debt grated so harshly on Burns's ears that he could not be at peace with himself so long as the pettiest account remained unpaid; and if he had no ready money in his hands to meet it, he must e'en borrow from a friend. His income, when he settled in Dumfries, was 'down money £70 per annum,' and there were perquisites which must have raised it to eighty or ninety. Though his hopes of preferment were never realised, he tried his best on this slender income 'to make a happy fireside clime to weans and wife,' and in a sense succeeded.
What he must have felt more keenly than anything else in leaving Ellisland was, that in giving up farming he was making an open confession of failure in his ideal of combining in himself the farmer, the poet, and the exciseman. There was a stigma also attaching to the name of gauger, that must often have been galling to the spirit of Burns. The ordinary labourer utters the word with dry contempt, as if he were speaking of a spy. But the thoughts of a wife and bairns had already prevailed over prejudice; he realised the responsibilities of a husband and father, and pocketed his pride. A great change it must have been to come from the quiet and seclusion of Ellisland to settle down in the midst of the busy life of an important burgh.
Life in provincial towns in Scotland in those days was simply frittered away in the tittle-tattle of cross and causeway, and the insipid talk of taverns. The most trifling incidents of everyday life were dissected and discussed, and magnified into events of the first importance. Many residents had no trade or profession whatever. Annuitants and retired merchants built themselves houses, had their portraits painted in oil, and thereafter strutted into an aristocracy. Without work, without hobby, without healthy recreation, and cursed with inglorious leisure, they simply dissipated time until they should pass into eternity. The only amusement such lumpish creatures could have was to meet in some inn or tavern, and swill themselves into a debauched joy of life. Dumfries, when Burns came to it in 1791, was no better and no worse than its neighbours; and we can readily imagine how eagerly such a man would be welcomed by its pompously dull and leisured topers. Now might their meetings be lightened with flashes of genius, and the lazy hours of their long nights go fleeting by on the wings of wit and eloquence. Too often in Dumfries was Burns wiled into the howffs and haunts of these seasoned casks. They could stand heavy drinking; the poet could not. He was too highly strung, and if he had consulted his own inclination would rather have shunned than sought the company of men who met to quaff their quantum of wine and sink into sottish sleep. For Burns was never a drunkard, not even in Dumfries; though the contrary has been asserted so often that it has all the honour that age and the respectability of authority can give it. There was with him no animal craving for drink, nor has he been convicted of solitary drinking; but he was intensely convivial, and drank, as Professor Blackie put it, 'only as the carnal seasoning of a rampant intellectuality.' There is no doubt that he came to Dumfries a comparatively pure and sober man; and if he now began to frequent the Globe Tavern, often to cast his pearls before swine, let it be remembered that he was compelled frequently to meet there strangers and tourists who had journeyed for the express purpose of meeting the poet. Nowadays writers and professional men have their clubs, and in general frequent them more regularly than Burns ever haunted the howffs of Dumfries. But we have heard too much about 'the poet's moral course after he settled in Dumfries being downward.' 'From the time of his migration to Dumfries,' Principal Shairp soberly informs us, 'it would appear that he was gradually dropped out of acquaintance by most of the Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long been by the parochial and other ministers.' Poor lairds! Poor ministers! If they preferred their own talk of crops and cattle and meaner things to the undoubted brilliancy of Burns's conversation, surely their dulness and want of appreciation is not to be laid to the charge of the poet. I doubt not had the poet lived to a good old age he would have been gradually dropped out of acquaintance by some who have not scrupled to write his biography. Politics, it is admitted, may have formed the chief element in the lairds' and ministers' aversion, but there is a hint that his irregular life had as much to do with it. Is it to be seriously contended that these men looked askance at Burns because of his occasional convivialities? 'Madam,' he answered a lady who remonstrated with him on this very subject, 'they would not thank me for my company if I did not drink with them.' These lairds, perhaps even these ministers, could in all probability stand their three bottles with the best, and were more likely to drop the acquaintance of one who would not drink bottle for bottle with them than of one who indulged to excess. It was considered a breach of hospitality not to imbibe so long as the host ordained; and in many cases glasses were supplied so constructed that they had to be drained at every toast. 'Occasional hard drinking,' he confessed to Mrs. Dunlop, 'is the devil to me; against this I have again and again set my resolution, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally abandoned; it is the private parties in the family way among the hard-drinking gentlemen of this county that do me the mischief; but even this I have more than half given over.' Most assuredly whatever these men charged against Robert Burns it was not drunkenness. But he has been accused of mixing with low company! That is something nearer the mark, and goes far to explain the aversion of those stately Tories. But again, what is meant by low company? Are we to believe that the poet made associates of depraved and abandoned men? Not for a moment! This low company was nothing more than men in the rank of life into which he had been born; mechanics, tradesmen, farmers, ploughmen, who did not move in the aristocratic circles of patrician lairds or ministers ordained to preach the gospel to the poor. It was simply the old, old cry of 'associating with publicans and sinners.'
We do not defend nor seek to hide the poet's aberrations; he confessed them remorselessly, and condemned himself. But we do raise our voice against the exaggeration of occasional over-indulgence into confirmed debauchery; and dare assert that Burns was as sober a man as the average lairds and ministers who had the courage of their prejudices, and wrote themselves down asses to all posterity.