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.