Though Scotland theoretically provided a free school in every parish, the usual gap separated theory and practice. Sometimes there was no school at all; often the school was an unsanitary hovel presided over by a master who was expected to live on a salary of perhaps ten or fifteen pounds a year, and who therefore was constantly driven to desperate shifts to provide for himself and his family. John Wilson of Tarbolton, for instance, the victim of ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’, tried to eke out his meagre earnings by starting a little grocery shop in his cottage, and in 1790 was ready to undertake the drudgery of a legal copyist in Edinburgh in order to better his condition. After the close of the century, when every parish was ordered by Act of Parliament to provide its schoolmaster with a house of at least two rooms, some lairds objected to erecting ‘palaces for dominies’. And even when a parish had a decent schoolhouse and a competent teacher, bad roads and lack of conveyance often made it impossible for children from outlying farms to reach it.
When William Burnes built his cottage at Alloway the fact that there was no school nearer than Ayr would scarcely have worried him. His own book-learning was sketchy, his writing cramped and laborious, though his speech was more precise and ‘better English’ than that of most of his neighbours. But he was devoutly religious, and cherished the sound Presbyterian conviction that first-hand acquaintance with the Scriptures was essential to knowledge in this world and salvation in the next. By the time his eldest son was six years old the father, conscious of his own inadequacy as a teacher, arranged with half a dozen neighbours to hire a master of their own. Their choice fell on John Murdoch, a solemn and pedantic youth of eighteen, who in mentality somewhat resembled Ichabod Crane. For wages of about sixpence a day and his board—which meant a share of the oatmeal and kail and part of a bed in each crowded cottage in turn—Murdoch undertook to instruct his charges, not without tears, in the three R’s and also in such elementary music as would enable them to sing the Psalms of David in metre at family worship.
In this latter accomplishment he found Robert Burns, who in manhood was able to remember and distinguish in all their subtle variations hundreds of folk melodies, an almost hopeless pupil with a harsh and untuneable voice. At the task of beating into the future poet the elements of spelling, grammar, and syntax he was more successful. Instruction in reading was based largely on a volume of extracts compiled by another Scottish schoolmaster named Arthur Masson—good enough literature for the most part, but too declamatory to be really within the grasp of a six- or seven-year-old intelligence. Robert’s first conscious realization of poetic experience came from Addison’s hymn, ‘How are Thy servants blest, O Lord’: he also memorized the ‘Fall of Cardinal Wolsey’ and other set pieces so thoroughly that throughout his life their phrases came unbidden from his pen. If Murdoch found difficulty in making the children understand the poetic merits of Hamlet’s soliloquies or of long passages from Home’s Tragedy of Douglas, he at least convinced some of them that poetry had meaning. One of his favourite exercises was making them paraphrase poetry into straight-forward prose—a device which his most famous pupil subsequently employed in exposing bad grammar in a female admirer’s verses.
Murdoch was not the man to set a poetic child’s imagination on fire, and since he applied the usual schoolmasterly standard of judging the pupils according to their docility, it is hardly surprising that he found the timid and gentle Gilbert a more promising lad than his brother. In any case, Murdoch’s service was too brief to have much permanent influence on Burns’s mind. Before the master had completed his tenure of about two years and a half at Alloway, William Burnes had removed to Mount Oliphant farm, separated from the school by two miles of sodden road which must have made regular attendance difficult, and sometimes impossible. Yet the master retained a sort of puzzled affection for the boy whom he was too prosaic to understand, and Burns reciprocated the feeling with real respect and esteem. Murdoch, in the schoolroom and in the long evenings in what he called the argillaceous fabric or mud domicile at Alloway, had at least impressed the lesson that books had meaning and that words should be used with precision. That Burns in later life never had any difficulty in saying precisely what he meant, he probably owed at root to Murdoch’s severe drill; that his style of saying it was frequently much too formal he likewise owed to the dominie and to the prose selections of Arthur Masson.
The earliest stages of book education are seldom important in shaping the maturity of the learner. They only furnish him with a few tools which he may later apply in his own way to his own ends. But with Burns the whole pressure of his formal education was all his life in direct conflict with his instinctive preferences. For John Murdoch, as for Arthur Masson, Scottish vernacular literature did not exist. Scottish writers like James Thomson and John Home, who had made reputations in England by writing in standard English, were admired to the far side of idolatry, but for Scottish youths, as for English, Pope was the model for poetry; the Tatler and Spectator for prose. Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden were the only writers earlier than 1700 who were widely read and unreservedly admired, though the beginnings of romanticism were evoking some lip-service to Spenser. If Chaucer was read at all, it was in the modernizations and imitations of Dryden, Pope, and Prior; the Elizabethan and Caroline lyrists were safe sources for newspaper poets to steal from, as Sterne stole from Burton. By modern standards, the amount of native literature needed in order to appear well-read was limited, but its very limitation intensified its pressure. Poverty kept Burns from the influence, for good or ill, of the classics; nothing could preserve anyone, who read at all, from the influence of the neo-classics. Outside the door the rich vernacular literature of Scotland was still vigorously alive, but no schoolmaster in Burns’s boyhood would have dreamed of letting it in.
This literature, indeed, was being steadily thrust further out of the cultivated world. Two years before the poet’s father was born, Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw had written the ballad fragment of ‘Hardyknute’ with genuine folk skill; in the next generation such interest as remained was contaminated with literary sophistication. The gentlefolk of William Burnes’s generation could no longer write true ballads, but they could and did write true folk-songs, as witness Jean Elliot’s ‘Flowers of the Forest’, Alison Cockburn’s ‘I’ve seen the smiling of Fortune beguiling’, and John Skinner’s ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John o’ Badenyon’. The gentlefolk of Robert Burns’s generation had lost this power too. Burns was six years old when Percy’s Reliques inaugurated the serious study of popular literature and let loose the spate of forgery and imitation of which Macpherson’s Ossian was the most brilliant success. The national will to believe in Macpherson’s fabrication was proof alike against the scorn of Dr. Johnson and the learning of antiquaries. To many Scots besides Burns Ossian was the ‘prince of poets’, to be read and admired as a patriotic duty, even if few of his vague and turgid phrases could be remembered long enough to quote. And what Macpherson did on the grand scale ballad ‘editors’ like John Pinkerton were doing on a small one, debasing even their genuine material with sentimental trash which blinded many readers to the merits of a really honest and accurate editor like David Herd.
But all this activity, alike of forgery and of honest collecting, never touched Burns in his formative years. In the boy’s world the folk literature which David Herd was recording was still alive. It is a favourite fallacy of the half-educated to identify book-learning with education. The things which made the mind and the art of Burns did not come from John Murdoch, but from people whom Murdoch no doubt patronized in his most schoolmasterful style. Agnes Broun was illiterate, but she was not ignorant. Like most intelligent illiterates, she had cultivated her memory, storing it with the pithy sayings which sum up generations of folk experience, and with the words and music of scores of old songs and ballads. These simple rhythms, sung as she went about her work, sank into her son’s mind without his knowing it. Years afterwards some chance association would recall an old line or stanza of his mother’s to supply the ‘starting note’ for a song of his own. And her repertoire was powerfully supplemented by old Betty Davidson’s, who ‘had the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery’. To these tales, listened to with delighted shudders, he ascribed the first awakening of his imagination, even though some of them scared him so thoroughly that their effect stayed with him into manhood. No doubt many a gentleman’s son heard similar stories from nurses and servants, but formal classical education effectually smothered any idea of putting them to literary use. Sir Walter Scott was almost the first child of the upper ranks to realize his folk-heritage, and probably he owed much of his freedom to do so to the interruption of his scholastic training. Ill-health saved him from formalism, as poverty saved Burns.
Burns’s acquaintance with popular and traditional literature was not, however, limited to what he heard at home. The eighteenth century was the heyday of the chapbook and the broadside—forms of popular literature resulting from the spread of literacy among the middle and lower classes, which were finally swept away by the newspaper. In Burns’s childhood every peddler’s pack contained an assortment ranging from topical songs and reports of the death and dying words of the latest criminal to abridgements of old histories and romances. Even the poorest labourer could afford the penny or two these publications cost, and they passed from hand to hand until they were worn out. William Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s modernization of Blind Harry’s History of Sir William Wallace, which so roused Burns’s boyish patriotism, may have reached the lad in chapbook form; the Life of Hannibal which he also mentions was almost certainly a chapbook; he was familiar from his earliest years with such ephemera as ‘The Aberdeen Almanac’ and ‘Six Excellent New Songs’. But he nowhere mentions another group of writings which he assuredly read.
Only a few years before Burns was born, Dugal Graham, the hunchbacked bellman of Glasgow, began publishing a series of Scottish chapbooks. Their popularity was enormous; total sales are alleged to have run into the hundreds of thousands. The most pretentious of Graham’s works was a metrical history of the ’45; the most characteristic were the humorous prose tales such as ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, ‘The Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman’, and ‘The Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork’. These chaps were made up of traditional anecdotes of a broadly comic sort, loosely strung together but supplied by Graham with the local colour of Scottish peasant life. Much of Graham’s material had a long history; coarse jests which go back at least as far as Chaucer; folk-tales of unquenchable vitality, such as the one on which Synge long afterwards based The Shadow of the Glen; quaint figures of speech and wild exaggerations, some of which crossed the Atlantic to become the progenitors of the American ‘tall story’. The peasant world as Graham depicted it was tough and crude and unlovely, but full of a coarse vitality which enlivened even the baldest passages of Graham’s prose and which at its best expressed itself in pungent phrases remembered and used by Burns, probably long after he had forgotten their source. The most indecorous stanza in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ is based on a phrase from ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, as is a similar stanza in ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’.
But the peasant life of Scotland, however squalid its physical circumstances as Dugal Graham portrayed them, had a variety of interest unknown to the modern dweller in a city slum. When the technique of all the varied crafts necessary to rural life had to be learned by example and oral tradition, the whole process of living was an education. Almost as soon as they were able to walk the children began to take their part in the work of the farm. At the age of six or thereabouts the boys would be helping to guide the four-horse team which dragged the clumsy plough; not long afterwards they began to share in reaping, threshing, and winnowing, besides doing the innumerable and endless small chores of the farm. These tasks, with all their accompanying observations of plants and animals, of weather and seasons, were stronger influences on Burns than John Murdoch was. No poet has revealed a closer or more accurate knowledge of nature; no poet, it may be added, had less of romantic enthusiasm for pure scenery. Burns knew nature as the peasant and the savage knows it, as something on which his health and prosperity and his very life depend. Readers who are surprised that Burns spent much of his youth in sight of the noble peaks of Arran without ever mentioning them in his verse simply fail to understand the realism of the peasant’s point of view. It was not the dalesmen who won a hard living from valley farms or kept their sheep on the bleak mountainsides who found the poetry in the Lake District. Had Burns been reared on Loch Lomond or at Aberfoyle it would have made no difference; he would have been too busy trying to wring a living from the soil to note the scenery. That had to wait for Sir Walter Scott, who had nothing to do but admire it. Even when he had won fame and had consciously accepted his vocation as a national poet Burns paid only lip-service to scenery as scenery. For him it was merely background for human figures, preferably female. The spots which really stirred his emotions were those with associations of history or song—Cawdor Castle, the field of Bannockburn, Elibanks and Elibraes, the Bush aboon Traquair. And the fact that so many of the folk-songs of Scotland celebrate the streams whose valleys were the only fertile spots may have fostered the love for running water repeatedly expressed in his poetry, as it certainly roused him to do for the streams of Ayrshire what his anonymous forerunners had done for the streams of the Border.