Not all the boy’s education, however, was thus casual and informal. When his removal from Alloway to Mount Oliphant made it impossible for his sons to continue regular schooling William Burnes procured a few textbooks such as Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar and Stackhouse’s History of the Bible for their instruction. Despite the burden of farm work the father managed at times to set regular lessons to be conned at evening by the light of the kitchen fire or a tallow dip. Robert and Gilbert helped to teach their younger brothers and sisters to read and write; their own lessons included the use of a brief religious catechism which their father had himself prepared with Murdoch’s help, for William Burnes was a devout man. Even in boyhood Burns, said Gilbert, was a reader when he could get books. He read whatever he could get his hands on, however dull or ponderous it might be, from theology to poetry. His own lists in his autobiography, highly selective though they are, are proof enough. His first knowledge of classical mythology, for instance, came from Andrew Tooke’s Pantheon, an appallingly dull and didactic outline of Greek and Roman religion. He never had Keats’s good fortune in discovering the Elizabethans: his Homer was Pope’s and not Chapman’s. But he reached manhood with a working knowledge of history and geography, a keen interest in current affairs, and an acquaintance with literature which, though spotty, was the more detailed because of its relatively narrow limits.
William Burnes’s effort to educate his children at home was part of a family struggle which became one of the strongest influences in forming his son’s character. The usual destiny of the children in a peasant family was to be hired out at the age of ten or twelve as farm servants. This fate, with its breaking of ties, cessation of schooling, and frequent moral danger, William Burnes was determined to avoid if possible. He was a stern father, but an affectionate one. John Murdoch remembered his wrath at a labourer’s ‘smutty innuendoes’, and his children knew that carelessness in word or deed would be sharply rebuked. But they likewise remembered many acts of wordless affection, as when during a thunderstorm the father came to sit with his daughter Agnes because he knew she would be frightened.
When it became evident that the few acres at Alloway could not continue to support his growing family, William Burnes rented from his old employer, Provost Fergusson, the larger farm of Mount Oliphant. Gilbert Burns, who seldom used superlatives, declared that Mount Oliphant was almost the poorest land he had ever seen in cultivation. Yet for its seventy bleak and stony acres William Burnes undertook to pay £40 a year for the first six years of his lease, and £45 for the next six. It may not be too uncharitable to assume that the Provost saw in the tenancy of the stubbornly independent Burnes a chance to get a poor farm raised to a better level of cultivation. At any rate he showed his confidence in his tenant by advancing a hundred pounds towards stocking the place. Without this help the venture would probably have been impossible; nevertheless it saddled the family with an additional load of debt. The weight of the burden can be realized from the fact that in the 1770’s in nearby Clydesdale twopence a dozen was a fair price for eggs, and chickens sold for sixpence a pair. Despite all handicaps, however, things went fairly well for the first half of the lease. In 1771 the family failed to take advantage of their privilege of relinquishing the farm, and accordingly were committed to another six years at an increased rental. Then began the series of disasters which ultimately killed William Burnes and permanently undermined the health of his eldest son.
Just at the onset of these dark days William Burnes, vexed at his children’s bad handwriting, managed to send Robert and Gilbert, turn about, to Dalrymple parish school for instruction in penmanship and grammar, that they might be better qualified to teach their brothers and sisters. By the following summer (1773), John Murdoch had returned to Ayr and Robert was spared from the farm for three weeks’ additional tutoring. The lad clutched at the opportunity like a famished man at food. He was with Murdoch ‘day and night, in school, at all meals, and in all [his] walks’. At the end of the first week, Murdoch says, ‘I told him, that as he was now pretty much master of the parts of speech, &c., I should like to teach him something of French pronunciation; ... and immediately we attacked the French with great courage. Now, there was little else to be heard but the declension of nouns, the conjugation of verbs, &c. When walking together, and even at meals, I was constantly telling him the names of different objects, ... so that he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases. In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching, that it was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in the business; and about the end of the second week of our study of the French, we began to read a little of the Adventures of Telemachus in Fénelon’s own words.’ How much French Murdoch really knew is doubtful, though he later undertook to teach it in London, and apparently secured some pupils until the Revolution filled the city with refugees who captured the market. Burns ultimately acquired a reading knowledge of the language, but if his riming ‘respectueuse’ with ‘Susie’ is a specimen of the pronunciation Murdoch taught he would scarcely have made himself understood in Paris.
Murdoch was this time most favourably impressed by Robert’s ability, and, in his own inimitable language, regretted that at the approach of harvest ‘Robert was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of Calypso, and, armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising himself in the fields of Ceres; and so he did, for although but about fifteen, I was told that he performed the work of a man.’ Murdoch had seen no signs of the qualities which Burns afterwards declared made him as a child by no means a favourite with anybody; in his eagerness for learning he displayed only the retentive memory and the enthusiastic ardour which would have most endeared him to the pedantic master. The ‘stubborn ungainly something’ which later ripened into pride was filling him with smothered rebellion against his lot in life; the weeks with Murdoch opened for a moment a door through which it seemed that he might escape. He was becoming class-conscious, and was developing a hatred of stupid wealth and power which never left him. His earliest associations with the sons of the gentry had not been unpleasant, for these lads had not yet acquired ‘a just sense of the immense distance between them and their ragged Playfellows’. ‘My young superiours’, he said, ‘never insulted the clouterly appearance of my ploughboy carcass, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons.’ They gave him stray volumes of books; one lad even helped him with his French. Nevertheless, he could remember in manhood how as a mere child he almost choked with rage in church one Sunday at the sight of a pretty servant-lass being compelled to leave her pew to make room for the stupid son of her employer.
About the time of his last association with Murdoch he began to have occasions for rage without going to church for them. Provost Fergusson died in 1771, and the administration of his property fell into the hands of a steward or factor. Fergusson had probably been lenient if his tenant could not make payment in full on each quarter-day, but it was the factor’s business to get in the rents, and if they were not paid he wrote threatening letters to demand them. It is always difficult for a debtor to see things from the creditor’s point of view; for Robert Burns it was impossible. For him the factor was a scoundrel, and his dunning letters were deliberate efforts to humiliate the unfortunates in his power. Not but what the Burnes family had reason for feeling resentful. They were doing everything that was humanly possible, and more than was wise, to meet the factor’s demands. They lived very poorly, even by Scottish peasant standards; meat was almost unknown on their table; they gave up all hired help. At the age of fourteen, as Murdoch noted, Burns was doing a man’s work, guiding the clumsy plough, flailing out grain by hand, and performing all the other tasks at which brute strength had to serve not merely instead of machinery but instead of well-made tools. His gait became the clumsy tread of the ploughman; his young shoulders developed a permanent stoop from handling the awkward plough-stilts. But the worst physical effect was invisible. The adolescent boy doing a man’s work on insufficient food was incurably injuring his heart. When the lesion began to manifest itself in dizziness and faintness Robert was not sent to a doctor. Probably it would have made no difference if he had been, for the trouble could scarcely have been diagnosed without a stethoscope. Instead he used heroic measures which must have aggravated the ailment. At one time he kept a tub of water beside his bed, and when faintness came on him in the night he would take a cold plunge. All his life he was plagued with fits of depression which he described by the fashionable term, hypochondria. His heart lesion intensified the nervous instability he had shown as a child, and thereby contributed to the perennially reckless conduct of his manhood. In all his life, as in his death, he continued to pay the heaviest share of the price of his father’s struggle to hold on at Mount Oliphant.
A boy seldom realizes that he is overstraining himself. What irked Burns at the time, far more than ‘the unceasing moil of a galley-slave’, was the fact that he was almost wholly cut off from social intercourse. Burns may not have been wholly an extrovert, but he needed society as an outlet for his high spirits and as a refuge from his low ones. In his earlier boyhood he had found friends both among schoolfellows of his own rank and among the sons of neighbouring gentlemen. At Mount Oliphant he was cut off. Murdoch would come out on his half-holidays, ‘with one or two persons more intelligent than [himself], that good William Burnes might enjoy a mental feast’. This conversation of ‘solid reason, sensible remark, and a moderate seasoning of jocularity’ was not what the boy needed. Robert and Gilbert ‘began to talk and reason like men, much sooner than their neighbours’, but this precocious maturity only made the lad more acutely conscious of his own lack of advantages. He envied the greater ease and assurance of his more fortunate fellows, and out of this envy and self-consciousness grew the aggressive manner upon which some of the gentry later remarked with disfavour.
As William Burnes’s tenure at Mount Oliphant neared its end the clouds opened a little. The father had never wholly abandoned his hope of providing his eldest son with some sort of education, and in the summer of 1775 managed to send him for a few weeks to learn ‘dialling and mensuration’ at Kirkoswald. Superficially the venture seemed as fruitless as the earlier effort to learn French in three weeks. The master, Hugh Rodger, was as pedantic as Murdoch, but inclined to be harsh and sarcastic where Murdoch was earnest and encouraging. Though Burns acquired some practical mathematics which later proved useful in his Excise work, he found the more vivid part of his education outside the classroom. With William Niven, a classmate of his own age, he indulged in spirited impromptu debates on such adolescent topics as ‘Whether is a great general or a respectable merchant the most valuable member of society?’ With a girl named Peggy Thomson he fell in love briefly, but so violently as to disorganize his work during his last days at school. Above all, he got glimpses of a sort of life very different from the seclusion of Mount Oliphant.
In the later eighteenth century smuggling rated as one of the major British industries. An excise tax of twenty shillings a gallon on spirits set an even higher premium on illicit dealing than prohibition did in the United States in the 1920’s. Few of the ‘best people’ had any more scruples about dealing with smugglers than Americans had about dealing with bootleggers. Nor was smuggling confined to liquors. Tea, French silks and laces, and other goods on which the tariff was high were also run in in quantity. The coast near Kirkoswald was a centre for landing goods intended for the Ayrshire and Glasgow markets because it was almost the last point smuggling vessels could approach without grave risk of being trapped by the revenue cutters in the narrow waters of the Firth of Clyde. Samuel Brown, the uncle with whom Burns stayed at Kirkoswald, probably had a quiet share in the business; at any rate his nephew saw plenty of smugglers. In the taverns where these men spent the profits of their successful ventures Burns witnessed roistering of a wilder sort than market nights at Ayr exhibited. His extremely limited means, however, make it improbable that he often looked unconcernedly on a large tavern bill, though ten years later he thought he had. More likely the awkward youth was a spectator, as the poet was at Poosie Nansie’s in 1785. A Shakespearian delight in the salty flavour of raw humanity was one of Burns’s life-long characteristics which first found expression at Kirkoswald. In 1783 he wrote to John Murdoch, ‘I seem to be one sent into the world, to see, and observe; and I very easily compound with the knave who tricks me of my money, if there be anything original about him which shews me human nature in a different light from anything I have seen before.’ His respectable friends often deplored what seemed to them a depraved taste for low company, but, as his best friend in Dumfries explained, it was not the lowness of the company that attracted him; his companions were of ‘low ranks, but men of talent and humour’. It was the colour of such company, its shrewdness, its reckless wit, and its unashamed gusto for life that made Burns prefer it to the drab respectability of the church-going bourgeoisie.
Crude humanity, however, was not the only thing Burns studied at Kirkoswald. He encountered some new books as well. Thomson’s Seasons introduced him to the chief Scottish poet of the century who had made his reputation by writing in standard English; Shenstone’s ‘Elegies’ and ‘The Schoolmistress’ initiated him into the poetry of sentiment, and the Spenserian stanza of the latter gave him the verse-form for ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. In reading these poets, however, he was merely extending an acquaintance already made through the specimens in Arthur Masson. His prose reading opened a different world. Novels were not to be found in the stricter Presbyterian homes, so Pamela, an odd volume of Ferdinand Count Fathom, and above all Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, were a vivid experience. Nothing in his previous training had inoculated him against the virus of sentimentality; exposed to its most extreme form, he was infected for life. This, the lad no doubt said to himself, was the way persons of superior sensitivity looked upon life; very well, he could prove that his sensibility was equal to theirs. At the first opportunity he bought a copy of The Man of Feeling and carried it with him everywhere until he wore it out.