All this the Earl succeeded in doing without offending the touchy poet by condescension, though Burns’s pride sometimes suffered because of Glencairn’s deference to people of superior rank. Once, indeed, Burns was ‘within half a point’ of throwing down his ‘gage of contemptuous defiance’ because the Earl was giving too much attention to a wealthy dunderpate, but even then he was quickly reassured as to Glencairn’s sincere good wishes. Touchiness aside, Burns’s position in Edinburgh recalls Benjamin Franklin’s at Versailles a decade before. In each place the fashionable world thought it had discovered a child of nature; in each place the newcomer had really a shrewder mind and a quicker penetration of character and motive than most of the élite who patronized him. The contrast between Burns’s attitude toward Glencairn and toward his fellow peer, the Earl of Buchan, shows how thoroughly the poet had learned to take men’s measure regardless of rank. Buchan also had professed great interest in Burns and was lavish with advice, but Burns recognized the man as an egotistical windbag and received his advice with an elaborate irony of compliment which would have betrayed itself to anyone less conceited than the busybody who once, when Sir Walter Scott lay ill, volunteered to arrange his funeral, and who, when he himself had written some amazingly bad verses, accepted as a tribute John Taylor’s publication of them in a part of The Scots Magazine ‘distinct from the mass of vulgar poetry’.
Nevertheless, Burns’s deference to Glencairn had unfortunate results. In securing William Creech, his brother’s former tutor, as Burns’s publisher, Glencairn thought he was doing the best possible good turn. Yet the outcome was months of vexation and delay for the poet, and the loss of all profits from later editions of his poems. Moreover, the poet had soberly decided that his best hope for a livelihood lay in securing an Excise post which would support him while he banked his profits as a reserve fund for his children. But Glencairn, like Mrs. Dunlop and other gentry whose knowledge of the lives of tenant farmers was limited to the quarterly receipt of their rents, was all for the poet’s investing his capital in a farm of his own. Disapproving of the Excise scheme, Glencairn would do nothing to forward it, though a word from him in the right place—that is, in the ears of Henry Dundas—would have procured Burns the appointment he sought. As it was, all hints fell dead, while meantime Patrick Miller dangled the bait of Ellisland. When at last Burns interested a man willing to help the Excise plan, the mischief was already done; he was committed to the undertaking which swallowed all his little capital. The best intentions of his would-be patrons kept turning to evil for Burns; even Glencairn’s gift of a diamond-pointed pencil made trouble by supplying the poet with the means of inscribing blazing indiscretions on window-panes.
Burns observed the rest of the Edinburgh gentry and literati as closely as he did Glencairn and Buchan. He was measuring himself and his native ability against them, and was not inclined to award himself second place. But he was not comfortable with most of them. Even if they did not offend him by overt condescension he was fully aware that they received him only because he was the fad of the moment. When the novelty staled he could not hope to continue many friendships in exalted quarters. The tide of popularity had swept him higher than he could expect to remain; its ebb might leave him stranded far lower than he deserved. It was not long, indeed, before his hosts began to find things to criticize. Burns not only said what he thought, he said it with an emphasis they found unbecoming in a man of peasant birth. The great Doctor Johnson could be as gruff as he pleased with his Scottish hosts because he was Johnson; Lord Braxfield could roar and Lord Kames rave, both bawdy, in a gentleman’s home because they were Lords of Session; for Burns to express emphatic opinions argued a lack of the humility which beseemed a ploughman entertained by his betters.
The fact was that Burns lacked both the finesse which would have enabled him neatly and inoffensively to deal with snubs, and the insensitive egotism which could have ignored them. No one could snub the Ettrick Shepherd, because his magnificent self-esteem made it impossible for him to see any remark in anything but a complimentary light. One did not safely snub Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, because that wasp could sting. Burns’s pride, unfortunately, not only made him sensitive; it made him aggressive and heavy-handed. When he flaunted the blue-and-buff of the Whigs he was going out of his way to assert his independence among people who were mostly Tories; when he told a lady, who had not waited an introduction before inviting him to her party, that he would come if she would also invite the learned pig from the Grassmarket, he was making a show of himself in one way in the very act of resenting being made a show in another. The consciousness that he was acting a part—whether behaving like a country bumpkin in Smellie’s printing-house, or posing as the Bard of Nature in drawing-rooms—no doubt partly explains some of his more violent outbursts. Thus when he demolished a clergyman, whose niggling criticisms of Gray had goaded him beyond endurance, with the Johnsonian thunderbolt, ‘Sir, I now perceive a man may be an excellent judge of poetry by square and rule, and after all be a damned blockhead!’ the victim was probably drawing all the electric tension which had been accumulating in the poet’s nerves through a long series of irritations and repressions. But such things did him no good in Edinburgh society.
It was not that his manners were worse than gentlemen’s. In some respects they were probably better. ‘Swearing,’ Henry Cockburn dryly records, ‘was thought the right, and the mark, of a gentleman. And, tried by this test, nobody, who had not seen them, could now be made to believe how many gentlemen there were.’ Boswell’s long-suffering wife, Margaret Montgomerie, took her husband to task for his loud and abusive manner of asserting himself in argument, and Boswell admitted to his journal that she was right. Benjamin Franklin remarked that Edinburgh was the only place he knew where violent disputatiousness was not confined to lawyers and university men. But when a mere peasant exhibited, in however mild a form, the traits of the gentry, he was forgetting his place, and should be put back in it.
Moreover, Burns quickly realized that these gentry scorned the national tradition which was his life-blood. If they did not all, like Dr. John Moore, urge him henceforth to write in standard English, they at least made it plain that a Scots poet could not aspire to literary equality with Dr. Beattie and Dr. Blair. Robert Fergusson was a regrettable scamp whom Edinburgh preferred to forget; Burns erected, at his own expense, a monument to Fergusson, and insisted, in speech and writing, on praising the dead poet and heaping scorn on the gentry who had let him starve. The place where Burns, after the first few weeks, really enjoyed himself in Edinburgh and where he made most of his intimate and lasting friendships, was among the Crochallan Fencibles. This was one of the numerous clubs in which lawyers and merchants carried on the old convivial traditions of their city. Edinburgh clubs were ancient institutions which arrayed bibulous functions in ceremonials ranging from the harmless High Jinks described by Scott in Guy Mannering to almost psychopathic debauchery in such an organization as the Wig Club. They were, in fact, along with the Freemasons, the ancestors both of the American fraternal orders and of the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs. In the more elaborately organized groups each officer, and sometimes every member, had a special title. Thus each member in Allan Ramsay’s Easy Club took the name of an old Scottish writer; in the Cape Club, to which Robert Fergusson belonged, each member was a Knight Companion of the Cape, with tides like Sir Cape, Sir Brimstone, Sir Precenter (Fergusson himself), Sir Nun and Abbess, and Sir Pope. The Fencibles went in for military designations. William Smellie, the gruff, slovenly, and erudite printer who was handling the Edinburgh edition of the Poems, as Adjutant of the corps introduced the poet. Burns’s publisher, Creech, proved a social disappointment as well as a financial disaster; his printer was a man after his own heart, an ‘old Veteran in Genius, Wit and Bawdry’. Smellie, like Burns, concealed an inward diffidence and sensitivity beneath an aggressive manner; like Burns, too, he was self-educated. The poet was not far wrong in describing him as ‘a man positively of the first abilities and greatest strength of mind, as well as one of the best hearts and keenest wits that I have met with.’ He had displayed his intellectual power in his Philosophy of Natural History, long regarded as a standard work, and in writing large sections of the original Encyclopædia Britannica; his wit he reserved for conversation, where, like Burns’s, it allowed no considerations of reverence or prudery to stand in its way. Despite his rough exterior, he was able to captivate an intelligent woman of the world like Maria Riddell, as well as the ebullient poet. But the records of this friendship were too much for Smellie’s squeamish executors; his biographer piously relates that ‘many letters of Burns to Mr. Smellie which remained, being totally unfit for publication, and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable people still in life, have been burnt.’
The records of another friendship which had its start among the Edinburgh bookmen fared better. Peter Hill, five years the poet’s senior, was in 1787 a clerk in Creech’s shop, but was soon to set up in business for himself and prove a kindly and indulgent master to an apprentice named Archibald Constable. Hill’s was one of the few friendships Burns made in Edinburgh which suffered no abatement with time. From the summer of 1787, when Hill was handling some of the innumerable details of business relating to the Edinburgh Poems, until the beginning of 1796, when Burns sent his ‘annual’ gift of a kippered salmon from the Nith, their association was unclouded. Hill supplied the poet with books, sent presents to his family, and took care of miscellaneous business errands in the city. Burns secured for Hill the book-orders, first of the Monkland Friendly Society and later of the Dumfries Public Library, and interspersed his business communications with hearty blasts of execration, broad humour, and messages to all their common friends. Though the phraseology of the letters often seems stilted, behind its stiffness glows a genuine affection and esteem.
But the backbone of the Fencibles was the lawyers. Their Colonel, William Dunbar, was a jolly little bachelor some years older than the poet; their Major and Muster-Master General was Charles Hay, friend of Boswell in the days when the latter was striving for distinction at the Scottish bar, whose port-inflamed countenance blinks above his judicial robes as Lord Newton in Raeburn’s superb portrait in the Scottish National Gallery. More notable for ‘law, paunch, whist, claret, and worth’ than for literary interests, Hay’s one poetic suggestion to Burns had humiliating results. He was among those who urged the poet to compose the unfortunate elegy ‘On the Death of Lord President Dundas’, the complete ignoring of which by Dundas’s son inflicted on Burns’s pride a wound which never healed.
Among the lawyer Fencibles the most congenial to Burns was Alexander Cunningham, a distant and impoverished relative of Lord Glencairn. Though Burns described him to his face as dissipated but not debauched—a subtle distinction of which the exact import is probably forever lost—Cunningham was diffident and retiring. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps also because of his kinship to Glencairn, Burns never sent him on such ticklish errands as he entrusted to Bob Ainslie, but their literary and intellectual fellowship was sincere. Unlike Hay and Ainslie, Cunningham had real fondness for the higher types of poetry, though to offset this he had the anglicized Scotsman’s inability to see anything but the ludicrous and the low in folk literature. Burns felt that in offering ‘My Love is like a red red rose’ to Cunningham he had to apologize for its simplicity; Popean imitations would have been more in his line. The young lawyer, in short, belonged to the generation which was trying to live down the national characteristics that meant most to Burns. In Edinburgh the legal profession was the last stronghold of the rich old gusto of Scottish life, the last group of men unashamed of being ‘characters’. But even there such traits belonged mainly to the generation passing or past which included men like Braxfield, Monboddo, and Kames, or to the already mature generation of Charles Hay and Henry Erskine. Cunningham belonged more nearly to the generation of Henry Cockburn, without Cockburn’s relish for the memories of traits which he did not share.
Within the limits imposed by his diffidence and his tastes, Cunningham had no reason to complain of lack of sympathy or confidence from Burns. When his first sweetheart jilted him with humiliating publicity, Cunningham told his sorrow to Burns, who had previously supplied him with a poor song in furtherance of his suit, and who now condoled in terms which bore hard on the young lady. The poet’s letters ranged from gay impromptu verses to the confession that as a result of the fiasco of the elegy, ‘I never see the name, Dundas, in the column of a newspaper, but my heart seems straitened for room in my bosom; & if I am obliged to read aloud a paragraph relating to one of them, I feel my forehead flush, & my nether lip quivers.’ On his part, Cunningham obtained for Burns the last national honour which Edinburgh conferred in his lifetime—election to membership in the socially exclusive Royal Company of Archers. And at the end Cunningham received one of the poet’s desperate appeals for help—not for money, but for intercession with the Commissioners of Excise not to put him on half-pay during his illness. Cunningham, moreover, shared with John Syme the credit for setting on foot the subscription for Jean and the children after Burns’s death, though his diffidence made him a poor collector of funds. Through diffidence, also, he permitted George Thomson to prepare for the newspapers the obituary he should have written himself, and by this neglect did injury to his friend’s memory.