Unpropitious though such beginnings were for a career as a tenant farmer, they were relatively unimportant compared with the inner compulsions arising from his discovery of his poetic vocation. Many another young farmer had sowed his wild oats and then settled down to rear a legitimate family and become an elder in the Kirk. For Burns such a future had really ceased to be possible even before he left Lochlie. In April, 1783, under the melancholy influence of his own ill-health and his father’s dark prospects, he had begun to keep a commonplace book with the avowed intention of some day showing the world that a young ploughman, little indebted to scholastic education, was nevertheless capable of rime and reason. When he started the book his literary models were Shenstone, Mackenzie, and the folk-songs of his country. At some time during the next year, however, the poems of Robert Fergusson came into his hands. They roused him as Chapman’s Homer roused Keats. For the first time he realized that the Scottish dialect might be something more than a dying relic of the past. He had been long acquainted with Allan Ramsay, but Ramsay belonged to the primitive age before Scottish letters had been ennobled by such geniuses as Henry Mackenzie, James Beattie, and John Home. Now he found that Fergusson, only ten years older than himself, had returned to the speech and the verse-forms of Ramsay. And Fergusson was no country boy but an educated lawyer’s clerk bred in the Athens of the North. Reading these poems Burns realized their vivid descriptions and their wit—realized also that what Fergusson had done he could do as well, or better. Mauchline parish offered as many themes for homely satire as Edinburgh did.
The theme ready to hand was ecclesiastical controversy. The neighbourhood was ululating with disputes between Old Lights and New Lights, and the leaders on both sides were behaving with the lack of charity peculiar to Christians on the war-path. Moreover, Burns’s landlord and friend, Gavin Hamilton, was in the thick of it, standing trial before the Kirk Session on a charge of Sabbath-breaking. Two neighbouring Old Light ministers—John Russell of Kilmarnock and Alexander Moodie of Riccarton—chose this time for a quarrel over parish boundaries, and conducted their holy row with the heat and personal invective of a heresy-hunt. Burns improved the occasion by composing ‘The Twa Herds’. Copying the poem in a disguised hand he showed it to Hamilton, remarking with studied gravity that he had no idea who the author was, but that he thought it pretty clever. Hamilton thought so too. Copies were passed from hand to hand; the New Lights, clergy as well as laity, received it with roars of applause; the Old Lights were correspondingly furious.
When Burns followed up ‘The Twa Herds’ with ‘The Holy Fair’, ‘The Ordination’, and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, the applause redoubled, and so did the enmity of the Old Lights. The man who challenges established institutions to their face needs to be sure of his own position. Burns’s indiscretion with Betty Paton not only left him wide open to counter-attack but assured him of far more unpleasant notoriety than ordinarily accompanied such lapses in peasant Scotland. It was impossible to remain in the parish without submitting to the discipline of the Kirk. Even at its mildest the ordeal of three successive penitential appearances before Mauchline congregation would have been intensely humiliating to a man as sensitively proud as Burns. But a young bachelor’s slips from grace were not usually treated very seriously except by the clergy and the Holy Willies. Had Burns been otherwise in good standing in the community he would have been able to go on much as before, but when the evidence of his breach of sexual morality was augmented by his ill-fame as a derider of the church he became, among all the more conservative members of the parish, little better than an outcast.
He may not have realized the full bitterness of the feeling against him until his repudiation by the Armours in the spring of 1786, but he realized enough. His reaction was as inevitable as the community’s had been. If he was to be an outcast he would live up to his reputation. Many of his biographers since, as well as many of his neighbours at the time, have taken at face value the blatant pride in his ill-repute which marks such poems as the ‘Epistle to John Rankine’. But this was not part of his real nature; he was simply brazening out his humiliation. The unco guid had decided that he was a dog with a bad name. He would show them that they had underestimated his capacity to shock them. That in the process he would make the parish too hot to hold him was a consideration not likely to occur to him in the full tide of his resentment.
But if his conflict with the Kirk had brought him humiliation it had also brought him the sense of power and the intoxication of applause. He had long known that his conversational wit and fire could dominate a knot of cronies. Now he had learned that he could write things which stirred both the laughter and the deeper emotions of educated men as well as of his social equals. The hostility of the Holy Willies was even more inebriating than the applause of Gavin Hamilton and his friends. Men do not hate unless they fear; the measure of his success and power was the measure of the antagonism he had aroused. The youth whose weakness it had always been to lack an aim had found one now. His education was complete. Intimate observation and experience of a small community had acquainted him with human nature, and had at last roused him to realization of his own capacities and his true vocation. His estimate of himself and his work, he later told John Moore, was pretty nearly as high in 1785 as it was two years later, after all the adulation of Edinburgh. All that he needed now was the opportunity to display his talents on a larger stage.
III
MEN
Burns entered on his manhood at Irvine in 1781. Before his ill-starred venture as a flax-dresser he was an aimless and inarticulately rebellious youth; after it, though he was still aimless for a time, his rebellion against the narrow world of his origin was overt and vocal. Yet even under the stimulus of Irvine he was long in finding his proper speech. When he wrote the earliest of his extant letters, Burns, already a man in years, was still a boy in mind. His self-conscious disquisitions on such high-resounding themes as Pride and Courage mark him as less mature at twenty-one than Chatterton was at sixteen; he had passed the age at which Keats died before he began to say anything worth heeding. At twenty-two, his vague aspirations momentarily focussed on the idea of establishing himself in business as a necessary prelude to matrimony, he made his sole attempt at living according to the standards of a working-day world. Materially, the attempt was an abject failure; spiritually, it set him on the direct road to realizing himself.
Knowledge of the material side of the Irvine partnership is limited to what Burns himself told in his autobiographic letter, which is not wholly reliable evidence. Not that Burns intentionally coloured the facts. The safest rule in reading his letters is to take it for granted that if he said a thing about himself it was true; if he said a thing about someone else, he believed it to be true. But to his passionate temperament and ‘skinless sensibility’ (the phrase is his own) anyone through whom he suffered loss or humiliation became almost automatically a villain of the blackest. Hence his charges that Peacock, his Irvine partner, ‘was a scoundrel of the first water, who made money by the mystery of thieving’, need not be taken literally. Burns, a complete greenhorn at business, may possibly have been taken in by an unscrupulous rascal, but it is equally possible that Burns in retrospect blamed Peacock for a failure in which they were both at fault. In any case, the business side of these months influenced Burns’s future only as it convinced him of his unfitness for ‘the little chicaning art of bargain-making’. What really mattered were the new friends, and the new ideas of himself and his place in the world inspired by these friends and by the introspection resulting from ill-health.
Chief of the new friends was the sailor, Richard Brown, whom Burns looked up to as a junior schoolboy looks to the athletic senior. Brown was about the poet’s age, but had all the worldly experience Burns lacked. He was better educated than most seamen of his day, though perhaps his story of having been patronized by a wealthy man who promised to set him up in life was only another sailor’s yarn. He had at any rate abilities of a sort. An incompetent man could not have become the master of a West Indiaman while still in his twenties. But in 1781 that promotion was still to win. Brown just then was down on his luck. His ship had recently been captured by an American privateer, and he had been put ashore on the coast of Connaught with nothing but his life and the clothes he wore. Nevertheless the friendship with Burns probably began with something of patronage on Brown’s part. The experienced, far-travelled, and distinctly hard-boiled sailor was interested in the awkward, stoop-shouldered country lad who in company alternated between sullen silence and—if he felt himself at ease—unusually vivid and copious speech. Obviously Brown realized that there was something in him; obviously also he took pleasure in enlightening him as to the ways of the world. Burns saw in Brown ‘every noble, manly virtue’ and strove to imitate him. Burns was already proud; Brown taught his pride to flow in proper channels—whatever that may mean. But Brown also was the only man the poet ever met who was a bigger fool than himself where women were concerned. The various goddesses by whom Burns’s tinder heart was continually lighted up still roused a hobbledehoy calf-love, as adolescent as his hero-worship of the sailor. Brown taught him that direct action might usually be counted on to bring results, and here, as Burns later admitted, the friendship did him a mischief.