Robert Burns

by Gabriel Setoun

The years of their stay at Mount Oliphant were years of unending toil and of poverty bravely borne. The whole period was a long fight against adverse circumstances. Looking back on his life at this time, Burns speaks of it as 'the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley slave'; and we can well believe that this is no exaggerated statement. His brother Gilbert is even more emphatic. 'Mount Oliphant,' he says, 'is almost the poorest soil I know of in a state of cultivation.... My father, in consequence of this, soon came into difficulties, which were increased by the loss of several of his cattle by accident and disease. To the buffetings of misfortune we could only oppose hard labour and the most rigid economy. We lived very sparingly. For several years butcher's meat was a stranger in the house, while all the members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their strength, and rather beyond it, in the labours of the farm. My brother, at the age of thirteen, assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and at fifteen was the principal labourer on the farm; for we had no hired servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt at our tender years under these straits and difficulties was very great. To think of our father growing old (for he was now above fifty), broken down with the long-continued fatigues of his life, with a wife and five other children, and in a declining state of circumstances, these reflections produced in my brother's mind and mine sensations of the deepest distress. I doubt not but the hard labour and sorrow of this period of his life was in a great measure the cause of that depression of spirits with which Robert was so often afflicted through his whole life afterwards. At this time he was almost constantly afflicted in the evenings with a dull headache, which at a future period of his life was exchanged for a palpitation of the heart and a threatening of fainting and suffocation in his bed in the night-time.'

This, we doubt not, is a true picture—melancholy, yet beautiful. But not only did this increasing toil and worry to make both ends meet, injure the bodily health of the poet, but it did harm to him in other ways. It affected, to a certain extent, his moral nature. Those bursts of bitterness which we find now and again in his poems, and more frequently in his letters, are assuredly the natural outcome of these unsocial and laborious years. Burns was a man of sturdy independence; too often this independence became aggressive. He was a man of marvellous keenness of perception; too frequently did this manifest itself in a sulky suspicion, a harshness of judgment, and a bitterness of speech. We say this in no spirit of fault-finding, but merely point it out as a natural consequence of a wretched and leisureless existence. This was the education of circumstances—hard enough in Burns's case; and if it developed in him certain sterling qualities, gave him an insight into and a sympathy with the lives of his struggling fellows, it at the same time warped, to a certain extent, his moral nature.

What was his outlook on the world at this time? He measured himself with those he met, we may be sure, for Burns certainly (as he says of his father) 'understood men, their manners and their ways,' as it is given to very few to be able to do. Of the ploughmen, farmers, lairds, or factors, he saw round about him there was none to compare with him in natural ability, few his equal in field-work. 'At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook,' he remarks, 'I feared no competitor.' Yet, conscious of easy superiority, he saw himself a drudge, almost a slave, while those whom nature had not blessed with brains were gifted with a goodly share of this world's wealth.

It's hardly in a body's power
To keep at times frae being sour,
To see how things are shar'd;
How best o' chiels are whiles in want,
While coofs on countless thousands rant,
An' ken na how to wair 't.'

His father, his brother, and himself—all the members of the family indeed—toiled unceasingly, yet were unable to better their position. Matters, indeed, got worse, and worst of all when their landlord died, and they were left to the tender mercies of a factor. The name of this man we do not know, nor need we seek to know it. We know the man himself, and he will live for ever a type of tyrannous, insolent insignificance.

'I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day,
An' mony a time my heart's been wae,
Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash,
How they maun thole a factor's snash:
He'll stamp an' threaten, curse an swear,
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear:
While they maun stan', wi' aspect humble,
An' hear it a', an' fear an' tremble.'

Is it to be wondered at that Burns's blood boiled at times, or that he should now and again look at those in easier circumstances with snarling suspicion, and give vent to his feelings in words of rankling bitterness? Robert Burns and his father were just such men as an insolent factor would take a fiendish delight in torturing. 'My indignation yet boils,' Burns wrote years afterwards, 'at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent, threatening letters, which used to set us all in tears.' Had they 'boo'd and becked' at his bidding, and grovelled at his feet, he might have had some glimmering sense of justice, and thought it mercy. But the Burnses were men of a different stamp. 'William Burness always treated superiors with a becoming respect, but he never gave the smallest encouragement to aristocratical arrogance'; and his son Robert was not less manly and independent. He was too sound in judgment; too conscious of his own worth, to sink into mean and abject servility. But this factor, perhaps more than anyone else, did much to pervert, if he could not kill, the poet's spirit of independence.

Curiously enough, the opening sentences of his autobiographical sketch have a suspicious ring of the pride that apes humility. There is something harsh and aggressive in his unnecessary confidence. 'I have not the most distant pretensions to assume the character which the pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a gentleman. When at Edinburgh last winter I got acquainted at the Herald's office; and, looking through that granary of honours, I there found almost every name in the kingdom; but for me,

"My ancient but ignoble blood
Had crept through scoundrels ever since the flood."

Gules, Purpure, Argent, etc., quite disowned me.' All this is quite gratuitous and hardly in good taste.