The pride which Richard Brown had taught to flow in proper channels was becoming all the more touchy as Burns’s confidence in himself increased. Sure of himself now among his equals, he was still resentfully helpless when superiors rubbed in their superiority. He had come as far as he could in his merely social capacity; what carried him the rest of the way was his poetry. Here Gavin Hamilton more or less unwittingly took the lead in introducing Burns to a new world. The Kirk Session of Mauchline, seeking to re-establish the old-time rigours of the Scottish Sabbath, had decided for once to make an example of a prominent citizen instead of an obscure one. Accordingly in the summer of 1784 Hamilton was summoned to stand trial for various ecclesiastical crimes such as absenting himself from church, habitually neglecting family worship, and causing a servant to dig new potatoes on a Sunday. On being convicted, Hamilton promptly appealed his case to the Presbytery of Ayr, and ultimately won it. How Burns intervened with ‘The Twa Herds’ has already been told. His authorship of that poem and its successors was soon avowed as the manuscripts passed from hand to New Light hand amid roars of Homeric laughter. People and institutions accustomed to taking themselves and being taken by others with the most intense seriousness are helpless in the face of mirth. Burns had found the one weapon which the orthodox could not withstand, though they could, and did, revenge themselves on the author of their humiliation. The fury generated by his satires did as much as, or more than, the odium of his personal sins to make Mauchline so unbearable that by 1786 Burns was ready to flee to Jamaica.
But if his satires made the village too hot for him they were also the direct means of enabling him to escape both from the village and from the ranks of the peasantry. One of the first friends to whom Hamilton showed ‘The Twa Herds’ was another lawyer, Robert Aiken of Ayr, who conducted and won Hamilton’s case before the Presbytery. Hamilton, apart from the conviviality almost inseparable from a man of his profession in eighteenth-century Scotland, was cool and businesslike. Aiken was emotional and enthusiastic, a good forensic reader and speaker, and an easy prey to sentiment. Pathos, in life or in a poem, suffused his eyes with tears and set the buttons popping on his tight waistcoat. But, like the more famous Man of Feeling, Henry Mackenzie, Aiken seldom in daily life permitted sentiment to overcloud common sense. Along with his fellow townsman, John Ballantine the banker, the lawyer soon became the poet’s confidant and chief literary adviser. ‘Orator Bob’ lost no opportunity of reading his young friend’s verses aloud, with such expression that Burns later declared he had never fully appreciated his own work until he heard Aiken read it. As the poet’s troubles thickened in the early months of 1786 it was with Aiken and Ballantine that he discussed both his plans for emigration and his arrangements for publishing his poems, their decision as to what ought to be included in the Kilmarnock volume apparently being final. Though Aiken’s action, as James Armour’s legal adviser, in cancelling whatever ‘lines’ Burns had given Jean, caused a momentary chill, the lawyer soon proved that his professional conduct did not interfere with his private friendships. He obtained 145 subscriptions for the Kilmarnock Poems—nearly one-fourth of the entire edition. Even amid the excitement of his first dazzling fame in Edinburgh Burns recalled with a glow of affection the kindly patronage of Aiken and Ballantine, and long after he had quitted Ayrshire forever he continued from time to time to send them new poems which he thought they might like. As late as 1791 he was still gratefully remembering Ballantine’s part in handing him ‘up to the “Court of the Gentiles” in the temple of Fame’—a figure of speech which combined neatness and literal accuracy. It was only to the outer court—that of the bourgeoisie and minor gentry—that Aiken and Ballantine were able to conduct him.
The association with Hamilton fared worse. Poetry, except in the form of humour and satire, did not, it would seem, appeal to Hamilton as it did to Aiken, and between him and Burns was always the barrier of their business relation as landlord and tenant. Ultimately, indeed, a matter of business estranged them. In the spring of 1788, nearly two years after Gilbert Burns had become the sole lessee of Mossgiel, Hamilton apparently asked Burns to become his brother’s surety. The poet, who was lending Gilbert nearly half the proceeds of the Edinburgh Poems, declined to commit himself any further:
‘The language of refusal is to me the most difficult language on earth, and you are the man of the world, excepting One of Rt Honble designation [i. e., Lord Glencairn], to whom it gives me the greatest pain to hold such language.... I never wrote a letter which gave me so much pain in my life, as I know the unhappy consequences: I shall incur the displeasure of a Gentleman for whom I have the highest respect, and to whom I am deeply oblidged.’
The foreboding was justified. After that reluctant refusal, Burns’s relations with his former landlord never regained their old cordiality.
In his contacts with Aiken, Ballantine, Hamilton, and certain of the New Light clergy Burns had, by the spring of 1786, taken a further step in the realization of his own capacities. He found himself quite at ease, at least in male company, among members of the professional class to whom as a lad he had looked up with awe. He was discovering, moreover, that he was not their inferior in native ability. Though he did not know it then, he had in fact reached as high a level as he was ever to maintain in Scottish society. These lesser gentry not only received him, but treated him as an equal. The higher gentry—people of estates and pedigrees—the higher professional classes, and the nobility, might receive him for a time, but always with a latent condescension. Sooner or later, even with Mrs. Dunlop, even with Robert Riddell, some incident would reveal that their feeling toward him was after all de haut en bas. The friends whom he kept among men of social and professional standing, from Aiken and Ballantine at the beginning of his career to Alexander Findlater and John Syme at its close, were gentlemen, were men of education, but they were not, in Burns’s favourite capitalized phrase, Great People.
But in the summer and autumn of 1786 it seemed there might be no limit to Burns’s social advancement. As he went about the country during August and September, collecting the subscriptions for his poems, the parish outcast of a few months earlier found himself everywhere courted and applauded. New acquaintances and old united to draw him out, and the bolder his remarks the better they liked them. But he was still capable of awe. In October came an invitation to dine on the 23rd at Catrine House, country home of Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh University. The company included Basil William, Lord Daer, the flighty and consumptive but liberal-minded son and heir of the Earl of Selkirk. In an amusing set of verses Burns described how, at the prospect of meeting a peer for the first time, his knees shook as he sidled into the Professor’s drawing-room, and he reverted to his old trick of watching from a corner until he had taken the measure of the company. The incident is worth mentioning because it was probably the last time Burns was ever unsure of himself in society. In later months and years he was often irritated and uncomfortable when members of the upper classes emphasized their elevation, but such feelings were the reverse of awe. Two months after the dinner at Catrine he was meeting professors and peers by the dozen instead of the brace, and was maintaining not merely self-possession but critical appraisal.
Burns’s standards of social intercourse, as of so many other things, were firmly established before the surviving records become full enough for detailed study. They were as honest and straight-forward as the rest of his dealings. Except for the brief embarrassment of a first meeting, rank as such meant nothing to him. What he demanded, and all he demanded, of any man was, in his own phrase, that he have something to him. That something must be native; a matter of mind and personality, not of social place. A Souter Johnie was better company than a Hugh Blair, because the cobbler’s wit and wisdom were the product of native shrewdness dealing with first-hand experience; the professor’s attainments were ‘meerly an astonishing proof what industry and application can do’. To his cultured friends, Burns seemed to have a perverse taste for low company, whereas his real quest was genuine company. His own unbridled wit and tempestuous emotions naturally made him gravitate towards other similarly endowed people, who too often were not pillars of society, but this was not his reason for choosing them. When a pillar of society bore himself ‘to all the Actors, high and low, in the drama of Life, simply as they merited in playing their parts’, and excelled in telling a story—in other words, when the pillar was Dugald Stewart—Burns enjoyed his company as much as John Rankine’s or Willie Nicol’s. Nor was wit or waggishness necessarily demanded. Grave wisdom Burns could relish as well as gay, though not in every mood; what he could never endure was dullness, pomposity, or conceit.
As the autumn of 1786 wore on, new friends and old agreed that the success of the Kilmarnock Poems should make Burns abandon his flight to Jamaica. He ought to publish a second edition in Edinburgh and then settle down, either on a farm of his own, or—as Aiken suggested—in the Excise service. The poet would find plenty of friends to help him win a hearing, and publishing in the capital would give him a national instead of a local audience. Burns must have made up his mind immediately after his dinner with Dugald Stewart. Among his new friends was Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Renfrewshire estates of the Earl of Glencairn. On November 1 Dalziel wrote to congratulate Burns on abandoning the West Indian venture and to tell him that he had showed the Poems to the Earl himself. The Earl bought a copy, which he had richly bound, and expressed warm interest in the poems and their author.
Thus began Burns’s most successful acquaintance with a peer—the only association of the sort which did not sooner or later end in apathy on one side and humiliation on the other. Though the circumstances of Burns’s earliest introduction to Edinburgh society are obscure, the obscurity is lightened if we take at face value the poet’s repeated statements that he owed everything to Glencairn—that the Earl, as he put it, took him by the hand and led him up to fame. Burns afterwards said that he went to the city without letters of introduction, but that can have been true only in the narrowest sense. Dalziel certainly apprised Glencairn of Burns’s plans, as Dr. Mackenzie apprised Sir John Whitefoord and Andrew Erskine, and as the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun apprised the blind poet, Thomas Blacklock. Dugald Stewart also must have known of the decision. Within a week of his arrival, Burns was the lion of the Edinburgh season. Many new friends must have contributed to such immediate success, but the poet’s emphasis on Glencairn’s kindness marks the Earl as the man who secured the patronage of the fashionable Caledonian Hunt, and probably also as his sponsor in Masonic society.