Robert Burns

by Gabriel Setoun

But here again the work the poet managed to do is a sufficient disproof of his irregular life. He was at this time, besides working hard at his Excise business, writing ballads and songs, correcting for Creech the two-volume edition of his poems, and managing somehow or other to find time for a pretty voluminous correspondence. His hands were full and his days completely occupied. He would not have been an Excise officer very long had he been unable to attend to his duties. William Wallace, the editor of Chambers's Burns, has studied very carefully this period of the poet's life, and found that in those days of petty faultfinding he has not once been reprimanded, either for drunkenness or for dereliction of duty. There were spies and informers about who would not have left the Excise Commissioners uninformed of the paltriest charge they could have trumped up against Burns. Nor is there, when we look at his literary work, any falling off in his powers as a poet. He sang as sweetly, as purely, as magically as ever he did; and this man, who has been branded as a blasphemer and a libertine, had nobly set himself to purify the polluted stream of Scottish Song. He was still continuing his contributions to Johnson's Museum, and now he had also begun to write for Thomson's more ambitious work.

Some of the first of his Dumfriesshire songs owe their inspiration to a hurried visit he paid to Mrs. Maclehose in Edinburgh before she sailed to join her husband in the West Indies. The best of these are, perhaps, My Nannie's Awa' and Ae Fond Kiss. The fourth verse of the latter was a favourite of Byron's, while Scott claims for it that it is worth a thousand romances—

'Had we never loved so kindly,
Had we never loved so blindly!
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.'

Another song of a different kind, The Deil's awa wi' the Exciseman, had its origin in a raid upon a smuggling brig that had got into shallow water in the Solway. The ship was armed and well manned; and while Lewars, a brother-excisemen, posted to Dumfries for a guard of dragoons, Burns, with a few men under him, watched to prevent landing or escape. It was while impatiently waiting Lewars's return that he composed this song. When the dragoons arrived Burns put himself at their head, and wading, sword in hand, was the first to board the smuggler. The affair might ultimately have led to his promotion had he not, next day at the sale of the vessel's arms and stores in Dumfries, purchased four carronades, which he sent, with a letter testifying his admiration and respect, to the French Legislative Assembly. The carronades never reached their destination, having been intercepted at Dover by the Custom House authorities. It is a pity perhaps that Burns should have testified his political leanings in so characteristic a way. It was the impetuous act of a poet roused to enthusiasm, as were thousands of his fellow-countrymen at the time, by what was thought to be the beginning of universal brotherhood in France. But whatever may be said as to the impulsive imprudence of the step, it is not to be condemned as a most absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum. We were not at war with France at this time; had not even begun to await developments with critical suspicion. Talleyrand had not yet been slighted by our Queen, and protestations of peace and friendship were passing between the two Governments. Any subject of the king might at this time have written a friendly letter or forwarded a token of goodwill to the French Government, without being suspected of disloyalty. But by the time the carronades had reached Dover the complexion of things had changed; and yet even in those critical times Burns's action, though it may have hindered promotion, does not appear to have been interpreted as 'a most absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum.' That interpretation was left for biographers made wise with the passions of war; and yet they have not said in so many words, what they darkly insinuate, that the poet was not a loyal British subject. His love of country is too surely established. That, later, he thought the Ministry engaging in an unjust and unrighteous war, may be frankly admitted. He was not alone in his opinion; nor was he the only poet carried away with a wild enthusiasm of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Societies were then springing up all over the country calling for redress of grievances and for greater political freedom. Such societies were regarded by the Government of the day as seditious, and their agitations as dangerous to the peace of the country; and Burns, though he did not become a member of the Society of the Friends of the People, was at one with them in their desire for reform. It was known also that he 'gat the Gazeteer,' and that was enough to mark him out as a disaffected person. No doubt he also talked imprudently; for it was not the nature of this man to keep his sentiments hidden in his heart, and to talk the language of expediency. What he thought in private he advocated publicly in season and out of season; and it was quite in the natural course of things that information regarding his political opinions should be lodged against him with the Board of Excise. His political conduct was made the subject of official inquiry, and it would appear that for a time he was in danger of dismissal from the service. This is a somewhat painful episode in his life; and we find him in a letter to Mr. Graham of Fintry repudiating the slanderous charges, yet confessing that the tender ties of wife and children 'unnerve courage and wither resolution.' Mr. Findlater, his superior, was of opinion that only a very mild reprimand was administered, and the poet warned to be more prudent in his speech. But what appeared mild to Mr. Findlater was galling to Burns. In his letter to Erskine of Mar he says: 'One of our supervisors-general, a Mr. Corbet, was instructed to inquire on the spot and to document me—that my business was to act, not to think; and that whatever might be men or measures it was for me to be silent and obedient.'

We can hardly conceive a harsher sentence on one of Burns's temperament, and we doubt not that the degradation of being thus gagged, and the blasting of his hopes of promotion, were the cause of much of the bitterness that we find bursting from him now more frequently than ever, both in speech and writing. That remorse for misconduct irritated him against himself and against the world, is true; but it is none the less true that he must have chafed against the servility of an office that forbade him the freedom of personal opinion. In the same letter he unburdens his heart in a burst of eloquent and noble indignation.

'Burns was a poor man from birth, and an exciseman by necessity; but—I will say it—the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase; his independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not subdue.... I have three sons who, I see already, have brought into the world souls ill-qualified to inhabit the bodies of slaves.... Does any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation? I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence.'

What the precise charges against him were, we are not informed. It is alleged that he once, when the health of Pitt was being drunk, interposed with the toast of 'A greater than Pitt—George Washington.' There can be little fault found with the sentiment. It is given to poets to project themselves into futurity, and declare the verdict of posterity. But the occasion was ill-chosen, and he spoke with all a poet's imprudence. In another company he aroused the martial fury of an unreasoning captain by proposing the toast, 'May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.' A very humanitarian toast, one would think, but regarded as seditious by the fire-eating captain, who had not the sense to see that there was more of sedition in his resentment than in Burns's proposal. Yet the affair looked black enough for a time, and the poet was afraid that even this story would be carried to the ears of the commissioners, and his political opinions be again misrepresented.

Another thing that came to disturb his peace of mind was his quarrel with Mrs. Riddell of Woodley Park, where he had been made a welcome guest ever since his advent to this district. That Burns, in the heat of a fever of intoxication, had been guilty of a glaring act of impropriety in the presence of the ladies seated in the drawing-room, we may gather from the internal evidence of his letter written the following morning 'from the regions of hell, amid the horrors of the damned.' It would appear that the gentlemen left in the dining-room had got ingloriously drunk, and there and then proposed an indecorous raid on the drawing-room. Whatever it might be they did, it was Burns who was made to suffer the shame of the drunken plot. His letter of abject apology remained unanswered, and the estrangement was only embittered by some lampoons which he wrote afterwards on this accomplished lady. The affair was bruited abroad, and the heinousness of the poet's offence vastly exaggerated. Certain it is that he became deeply incensed against not only the lady, but her husband as well, to whom he considered he owed no apology whatever. Matters were only made worse by his unworthy verses, and it was not till he was almost on the brink of the grave that he and Mrs. Riddell met again, and the old friendship was re-established. The lady not only forgot and forgave, but she was one of the first after the poet's death to write generously and appreciatively of his character and abilities.

That the quarrel with Mrs. Riddell was prattled about in Dumfries, and led other families to drop the acquaintance of the poet, we are made painfully aware; and in his correspondence now there is rancour, bitterness, and remorse more pronounced and more settled than at any other period of his life. He could not go abroad without being reminded of the changed attitude of the world; he could not stay at home without seeing his noble wife uncomplainingly nursing a child that was not hers. He cursed himself for his sins and follies; he cursed the world for its fickleness and want of sympathy. 'His wit,' says Heron, 'became more gloomy and sarcastic, and his conversation and writings began to assume a misanthropical tone, by which they had not been before in any eminent degree distinguished. But with all his failings his was still that exalted mind which had raised itself above the depression of its original condition, with all the energy of the lion pawing to free his hinder limbs from the yet encumbering earth.'