Among the Tarbolton Bachelors was David Sillar—not a charter member of the Club, but admitted to it early in 1781. A year younger than Burns, Sillar, under his friend’s inspiration, produced a few commonplace poems which gave Burns the excuse for hailing him as brother poet. Sillar had a certain gift for characterization in prose; he described Tarbolton townsfolk as ‘uncontaminated by reading, conversation, or reflection’, and left the most vivid extant picture of Burns on the threshold of manhood. Burns was beginning to reveal the playboy elements in his nature—that desire above all things to be conspicuous which he shared with such very different geniuses as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Bernard Shaw. In a day when strict Presbyterians still cropped their hair, after the fashion which in the previous century had earned them the name of Roundheads, Burns let his grow long and wore it in a queue—‘the only tied hair in the parish’. When everyone else was wearing plaids of ordinary shepherd’s gray, Burns sported one of dead-leaf colour. And since the uncontaminated parishioners of Tarbolton were orthodox Old Lights Burns acquired easy notoriety by setting up as a heretic.
Throughout his life Burns managed always to acquire a maximum of ill-repute with a minimum of actual transgression. It was not so much that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously. Sometimes the conspicuousness was mere ill-luck. A fair portion, for instance, of the Edinburgh gossip which clung to his name may well have originated in the fact that both the servant girls with whom he had relations in the city brought legal action against him—a consequence he could scarcely have foreseen. On the other hand, his desire to startle the parish frequently bore fruit in suspicions and enmities impossible to live down. G. K. Chesterton once advised the village genius who wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile and also very strong, not to come up to London but to stay at home and have a row with the rector. This was precisely what Burns did. The New Light doctrines which soft-pedalled such Calvinistic dogmas as predestination had already conquered Edinburgh and Glasgow and were beginning to invade the provinces. In any case Burns’s saturation in the sentimentalism of Mackenzie and Sterne would have made him receptive to the New Light emphasis on Benevolence and the Moral Sense. But when the congeniality of the new doctrines was joined with an opportunity to startle his neighbours the combination was irresistible. He began, he says, to debate theology with such heat and indiscretion as to raise a cry of heresy which persisted in Tarbolton and Mauchline as long as he remained there. An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, pictures him in the kirkyard between services, expounding heretical doctrines with such vigour as to elicit hisses and cries of ‘Shame!’ from his auditors. At least the story is true in spirit. Burns was determined to be conspicuous, even if it meant hisses instead of applause.
Masonic affiliations, which after his return from Irvine supplanted the Bachelors’ Club, gave him still another chance to indulge both his social instincts and his sympathies with liberal thought. A rural lodge like St. James’s at Tarbolton was, to be sure, no such centre of political liberalism as were the Masonic lodges of the Continent during the later eighteenth century. The chief activity, in fact, of most of the Scottish lodges seems to have been convivial, with the additional feature, lacking in the ordinary social club, that the members were pledged to help their fellows in sickness or distress. Nevertheless the knowledge that brother Masons in England and abroad were disseminating ideas which challenged absolutism in government and religion must have reached even village youths in Tarbolton. In Scotland, moreover, the ritual which dignified the childish thrill of membership in a secret organization gave Freemasonry an emotional appeal which the drab services of the Kirk and the narrow routine of every day lacked. From the time when he joined St. James’s Lodge, about 1782, until after his sojourn in Edinburgh, Burns took his Masonic duties with the utmost seriousness. He helped to put the struggling and almost bankrupt lodge on its feet; from 1784 to 1787 he was its Depute Master. In Edinburgh he continued his affiliations, and perhaps the highest moment of all his early triumphal progress in the capital came at the meeting of the Grand Lodge of Scotland on January 13, 1787, when the Grand Master gave the toast, ‘Caledonia, and Caledonia’s Bard, brother Burns!’ It is idle to conjecture if the coolness which followed his first acclaim in Edinburgh reached into Masonic circles; certainly the poet’s interest in the craft waned in his later years. His letters from Ellisland and Dumfries scarcely mention it, except when he was in trouble and wanted Robert Graham to help him as a Mason as well as a friend. He duly affiliated himself with the Dumfries lodge, and became its Senior Warden, but if silence means anything the zest was gone.
The Masonic fellowship of course was male, but Burns was not forgetting his obligations as a member of the Bachelors’ Club. His own statements and Gilbert’s, already quoted, show a succession of passing infatuations with various girls whose names, even, are doubtful, and of whose personalities the most ardent legend-mongers can scarcely summon up a wraith. By comparison with such shadows as Anne Rankine and Mary Morison, even Nellie Kilpatrick who stirred the poet’s blood for a single harvest, and Peggy Thomson, who overset his trigonometry at Kirkoswald, are three-dimensional. The one figure who half emerges from the shadows is Alison (or Ellison) Begbie. Burns met her in 1780 or 1781, but understanding of the matter is not clarified by the possibility that some of the five letters supposed to have been addressed to her may really be drafts of the love-letters he frequently wrote for his friends. Assuming them all to be Alison’s, they prove mainly that Burns had not yet learned much about women. If ever farm-lass was wooed in such stilted and temperate phrases it is pretty certain that she was not in this humour won. Burns’s intentions were serious; he wanted to marry Alison. Unfortunately the intentions made him serious too. He seemed afraid to commit himself in writing. A bystander is not surprised that Alison refused the man who told her that her company never gave him those giddy raptures so much talked of among lovers, and who announced that in his opinion married life was only friendship in a more exalted degree. It did surprise Burns. Indeed the shock of it led him subsequently to charge her with having jilted him, a difficult feat when his own letters prove she had never accepted him. No doubt she had merely employed the ancient technique of mild and noncommittal encouragement while she was making up her mind. Burns had prided himself on his skill in letter-writing and on his address with women. To be flatly rejected the first time he made a serious proposal upset him for several months. It also completed his sentimental education. Thereafter, until he met Clarinda, he knew better than to do his courting by post.
But friendships with men and women, though they helped him momentarily to escape his blue devils, could not obscure the problem of his own and his family’s future. He still lacked an aim. Conscious of more than average powers in himself, he had no purpose to which to direct them. Moreover, the years at Lochlie were bringing him for the first time to a realization of the workings of the larger economic laws. The American War was ruining the West of Scotland. Half its market for manufactured goods was closed; its exports to the West Indies were being raided by American privateers. Just before the war an over-expanded bank had failed, dragging down with it half the gentlemen in Ayrshire and leaving a trail of wreckage which was not wholly obliterated for a couple of decades. Even the wartime demand for farm produce was no help when multitudes of jobless artisans could not pay the high prices which at best would scarcely have yielded a fair return on the over-capitalized land. M’Lure, the landlord of Lochlie, was heavily mortgaged to the defunct bank. Hard pressed for cash, he tried to extort from his tenants more than was his due. William Burnes resisted, and became involved in litigation which followed him to the grave. In similar circumstances at Mount Oliphant Burns had seen merely a personal situation in which a villainous factor was demanding more rent than the family could pay. Now he began to realize that a man may be frugal and diligent in his business, and yet be destroyed by forces which he did not start and was powerless to control.
As early as 1780 Burns had experimented at growing flax of his own on a few acres of land subleased from his father; later he won a prize for his seed. His success led him in 1781 to go to Irvine to learn the trade of flax-dressing. Some consequences of that venture belong in the next chapter; educationally the results, like those of so many youthful experiences, were mainly negative. His distaste for the work, and its ill effect on his health, left him more aimless than before. He concluded that he was unfit for the world of business, and where he had formerly yearned for some chance of advancement he now decided that he was destined to be only a looker-on at life. All that restrained him from complete shiftlessness was his sense of responsibility for his family.
Intellectually, that sense was keener and more insistent than ever, but now for the first time it was in direct conflict with a storm of emotions. Burns had come home empty-handed as the prodigal, to find his father visibly sinking under the united effects of worry and tuberculosis. It was plain that even if his contest with his landlord should be decided in his favour he would never be fit to undertake another farm. By the beginning of 1783 the whole family, including William Burnes, realized that death was at best a matter of months. M’Lure the landlord realized it too, and such scenes as had accompanied the reading of the factor’s letters at Mount Oliphant were re-enacted at Lochlie with triple poignance. The children were old enough this time to understand the whole meaning of the affair; their father was a broken man, and where the factor had merely threatened legal action, M’Lure was taking it. The outcome of the case and the practical means whereby Gavin Hamilton helped the family through the crisis will be told later; its emotional impact on Burns himself, coming as it did on the heels of his own failure at business, could hardly be overstated. He saw his father’s lifetime of struggle for independence ending in defeat and despair. Recollection of Mount Oliphant and Lochlie never ceased to haunt his own ventures as a farmer, and helped to damn them. Fear and hatred of one’s economic position are seldom the heralds of success.
Burns’s whole nature, in fact, was beginning to cry out against the life he was expected to lead. Not even the loyally accepted burden laid upon him from his father’s weakening hands could hold him steady. He had come back from Irvine, as before from Kirkoswald, incapable of fitting again into the narrow pattern of the life he had lived before his departure. He had outgrown his mould. The dying father noted with concern that his son was spending longer hours with wilder companions, and displaying a new aggressiveness and assurance in his manner of speaking with women. Nevertheless the shadow of the old man’s authority was still enough, when reinforced by the desperate need of securing the future of the family, to inhibit the full expression of the new tendencies. Gilbert’s testimony is explicit. At Lochlie he and Robert were both allowed the usual labourer’s wage of £7 a year, against which was charged the value of every piece of clothing manufactured at home. Neither there nor at Mossgiel did Robert’s expenditures exceed this frugal sum. It was extravagance of emotion, of speech and conduct, not of expense, that beset the poet.
On his deathbed, on February 13, 1784, William Burnes muttered that there was one member of his family for whose future conduct he feared, and Robert, in tears, took the admonition to himself. Hardly was the family settled at Mossgiel, after some strictly legal dodging which must have increased the poet’s inward distaste for the whole business, when the traits his father had dreaded began their full play. Though he entered on his responsibilities as head of the family with the best of resolutions, his heart was not in the undertaking. He read farming books, calculated crops, and attended markets, but his mind was elsewhere. According to his own account, he lost interest in the work because of two successive crop-failures, the first owing to bad seed and the second to a wet harvest. But this was an excuse, not an explanation. The real reasons lay within himself. They were his passions and his art.
His father’s death had removed the last check upon social indulgence. Always shunning the solitude which produced brooding melancholy, he had found in Mauchline a new and gayer set of cronies whose company was more congenial than that of his family in the crowded cottage at Mossgiel. More and more of his time was spent in the village taverns—not for drunkenness, but for the pleasure of sharing the hilarity of careless youths and the uninhibited wit of older ‘men of talent and humour’ like his neighbour John Rankine. The rigidly righteous began to frown on the young farmer whose reckless sallies were sure to provoke the wildest outbursts of laughter. And even at Mossgiel there were distractions from a sober and godly life. The household included a young servant-lass named Betty Paton, whose charms, like those of most of Burns’s sweethearts, were mainly physical. Within a few months of his father’s death Betty became Burns’s mistress, and in May, 1785, bore his first child amid all the accompaniments of a public scandal in the parish.