Had Burns known more of literature and of the world he would have been able to take Mackenzie’s sentiment at the proper discount. Then the book’s influence might have been good. It might gently have corrected the harshness of his peasant background, as the literature of sentiment in general ameliorated the brutality of the eighteenth-century world. As it was, the book set up a preposterous ideal which divided Burns’s energies and sometimes vitiated his work. The crudities of peasant life needed softening and elevating, but sentimentalism made many of his efforts in this direction mawkish instead of humane. The poet who portrayed an old farmer’s affection for a faithful mare was revealing sentiment in the best sense of that much-abused word; the poet who moralized over a ploughed-under weed was pumping up emotions such as no real farmer ever felt. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that the foundations for the weakest elements in his work, as well as for the magnificent zest of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, were laid at Kirkoswald.
Burns was probably right in saying that he came home considerably improved. But he was also discontented. Mount Oliphant seemed narrower and drabber than ever after the colour of the smuggling village, and he had become acutely conscious—thanks equally to Peggy Thomson and to his tavern companions—of his own awkwardness. This consciousness led him to his first overt act of rebellion. In ‘absolute defiance’ of his father’s commands, he attended a country dancing school, to improve his manners. William Burnes’s ‘Manual of Religious Belief’ indicates a willingness to mitigate some of the sterner points of Presbyterian theology, but he was in full agreement with the Kirk’s condemnation of worldly amusements. Gilbert Burns, as well as some of his brother’s biographers, tried to explain away the remark about defiance, and the father may not have pressed the point too far when he saw that Robert’s mind was made up. Undoubtedly, however, Burns was correctly describing his own feelings at the time, and though the father sensibly accepted the accomplished fact and later allowed his other children to learn dancing he thenceforth regarded his eldest son’s conduct with suspicion and concern.
On leaving Kirkoswald Burns had undertaken to carry on a literary correspondence with some of his schoolfellows. He was bent on improving his powers of expression and acquiring a literary style. But the medium he selected was prose. Probably in retrospect he exaggerated the actual extent of this correspondence—it is hard to believe that ‘every post’ brought him as many letters as if he had been a merchant, or that he could have paid the postage if it had. The few surviving specimens are quite enough. The poet’s uncle had once set out to buy one of the manuals of letter-writing which supply models for most of the imaginable contingencies of human life; he brought home instead ‘a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Ann’s reign’. The exact volume has never been identified, though Burns’s subsequent quotations show that it included letters of Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. But the eighteenth century, until Boswell taught it better, did not publish really familiar letters. Such collections as Pope helped to bring out were really composed of brief essays. Personal opinion was subdued; personal news was deleted. The ‘unbridled effusions’ which make the charm of familiar letters were suppressed. On such unfortunate models, almost as stiff as Elizabeth Rowe’s ‘Letters Moral and Entertaining’ which he had found in his Masson, Burns set to work. The result was the same as when he encountered The Man of Feeling. A youth bred among literate people would have realized intuitively that these models showed only one side of letter-writing. Burns, with no other standards to measure them by, took them as the whole of the law and prophets, and shaped his epistolary style accordingly. His ear, attuned to the subtlest modulations of poetry, remained always deaf to the quieter graces of prose: when Dugald Stewart commended the simplicity of Franklin’s writing, Burns could see nothing in it, ‘when compared with the point, and antithesis, and quaintness of Junius.’
Those who have judged Burns adversely as a letter-writer would have still more grounds for their criticism had more letters survived like the few to William Niven and Thomas Orr. These country youths admired Burns’s solemn analyses of Pride and Courage and his exhortations to be content with poverty; so, unfortunately, did the better-educated friends of his later life. The letters which he transcribed for Lady Harriet Don in 1787 and for Robert Riddell in 1791-93 belonged to the same school of prose as his earliest epistles to Niven. Burns would never have thought of making, nor his friends of asking for, transcripts of the admirable discussions of Scottish song which he sent to George Thomson, nor of his easier letters to John Ballantine and Mrs. Dunlop. No epistolary Robert Fergusson ever came into his hands to show him the way to a conversational style. When he wrote easy prose it was in spite of his models and because he had something to say which really demanded saying.
When the family at last escaped from Mount Oliphant in 1777 Burns was eighteen, the age at which Chatterton, seven years before, had taken his own life. But Burns’s self-education was a much slower process than Chatterton’s. At eighteen he was still an awkward rustic, with all his intellectual and artistic powers still to find. The most positive result of the long ordeal at Mount Oliphant—apart from its injuries to his health—had been the building up of a strong sense of family loyalty. William Burnes had made every sacrifice to keep his family together, and the feeling that this was a primary obligation had been deeply impressed on his son. For the moment their prospects seemed hopeful. The father had managed to lease the larger farm of Lochlie near Tarbolton, and had again obtained from his landlord a cash advance for stock and improvements. But again Burnes was paying the penalty of his desperately independent character. For Lochlie’s hundred and thirty acres of sour clay—so sour that the lease provided for two separate applications of lime at the rate of 400 bushels to an acre—its putative owner, David M’Lure, set a rental of £130. It was a ruinous bargain which broke William Burnes’s spirit, helped to kill him, and gave his children some first-hand acquaintance with the chicanery of the law.
On Burns the first effect of the removal to Lochlie was social. The farm was within easy reach of Tarbolton village, where he found the companionship his nature craved. Of his friends at Mount Oliphant James Candlish’s is the only name that has not perished; those of the Tarbolton cronies are enshrined in both verse and prose. For the first couple of years the records are almost blank. By his own testimony, and Gilbert’s, he was constantly falling tempestuously in love, usually with girls of his own rank, or below it, for ‘he had always a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or who had more consequence in life’. His imagination could always endow any girl to whom he was attracted with a plentiful stock of charms which bystanders often failed to perceive. His ready pen, moreover, was constantly at the service of his less fluent friends who sought his aid in composing their love-letters, and he ‘felt as much pleasure at being in the secret of half the amours in the parish, as ever did Premier at knowing the intrigues of half the courts of Europe.’ But Gilbert’s testimony corroborates his own statement that none of these early affairs passed the bounds of decorum. The fervours which he had first experienced when reaping with Nellie Kilpatrick at the age of fifteen were growing stronger and more clearly defined, but they were still adolescent.
This adolescent Burns figures also in the proceedings of the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, a social and debating society which he and a few friends organized in the autumn of 1780. Its fragmentary records show the youths arguing such windy topics as Burns had discussed with Niven five years before, but with a more direct application to his own walk of life. E. g., ‘Whether is the savage man or the peasant of a civilized country, in the most happy situation?’ ‘Whether is a young man of the lower ranks of life likeliest to be happy who has got a good education, and his mind well informed, or he who has just the education and information of those around him?’ ‘Whether between friends, who have no reason to doubt each other’s friendship, there should be any reserve?’ Such topics point to Burns as their propounder, as do some of the Club’s rules. The one which barred religious topics was doubtless in the interest of peace, but Burns’s hand is evident in the tenth and last:
‘Every man proper for a member of this society must have a frank, honest, open heart; above anything dirty or mean; and must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex. No haughty, self-conceited person, who looks upon himself as superior to the rest of the club, and especially no mean-spirited, worldly mortal, whose only will is to heap up money, shall on any pretence whatever be admitted....’
Indecorum of language was likewise barred, and clerical biographers in discussing these rules have left the impression that the Club was a kind of Y.M.C.A. From what we know of peasant life in Scotland and of the adolescent male everywhere, it is possible that the biographers were mistaken. Whatever his conduct in 1780, Burns was soon applying the tenth rule in no platonic or idealistic sense.
Nevertheless the Club played an important part in developing his powers. Besides giving him an audience for his ideas it showed him that he could dominate his audience. Thenceforward Burns took the lead in any social group where he was intimate; his companions, re-echoing his wit, believed that they shared it and even convinced him that they did. The roster of his friends includes many wholly commonplace people like John Richmond and Robert Ainslie who shone only by reflected light, but whose satellite nature Burns was quite unaware of at the time. Moreover, the Club gave him almost his first experience of the wine of applause, and he found it a heady vintage.