All witnesses agree that Robert Burns was a vivid and dynamic personality. All readers of his poetry concur. Yet somehow the personality which blazes in the poems and glows in the letters only smoulders in the biographies. Why is it so hard to write a dull life of, say, Byron, and so easy to write a dull one of Burns? For one thing, there are too many biographies, all following the same stereotyped outline of dividing the poet’s life according to the places he lived in instead of according to the things he did and thought. Then really graphic memorabilia are scarce, especially for the formative years in Ayrshire. People keep saying that Burns was a brilliant talker, but they seldom report his talk. Finally, too many biographers have worked in the wrong mood, intent on moralizing or deprecating rather than interpreting.

This book is not a biography, if that word connotes a narrative written in straight time-sequence. It is, instead, my answer to the question, subordinated or ignored by most chronological biographers, What sort of a man was Robert Burns? I have therefore discarded time-sequence in favour of the relationships of everyday life in which Burns most clearly revealed his personality. The plan has at least the advantage of passing quickly over his almost undocumented youth, and concentrating attention upon his fully recorded manhood. The formal biography, whether it be Mrs. Carswell’s romantic approach or Professor Snyder’s scholarly one, suffers from the necessity of devoting more space to the scantily reported twenty-seven years in Ayrshire than to the five richly documented years in Dumfries. I have assumed that Burns’s character can best be determined from the completest records. Perhaps to himself John Syme and Maria Riddell were not so important as Robert Muir and Margaret Chalmers, but the later friendships can be studied at full length; the earlier ones cannot. Hence I have given most space to the relationships in which guess-work can be kept to a minimum.

So, too, I have deliberately limited myself to the best authenticated sources—Burns’s own letters and poems, and the letters and other records of his immediate contemporaries. Unsupported oral tradition I have avoided as basic material. Though I use such anecdotes now and again as secondary illustrations, it is always with a warning as to their nature. I have likewise tried to make clear the distinction between facts and the inferences I have drawn from them.

In one respect at least my preparation for writing about Burns is unique. Most editors and biographers have either been bred in the rosy mists of the Burns legend or have worked their way back to the original records through a mass of secondary printed matter. Up to a dozen years ago my knowledge of Burns and his times included little beyond such reading of major works and standard criticism as one does in preparation for the doctorate. In 1925 I undertook to edit a reprint of Burns’s chief poems. Discovering in the course of that job how unsatisfactory were all editions of his correspondence, I thereupon plunged into the work of tracing and collating the original holographs. Not until after thorough immersion in these primary sources did I extend my studies to the letters and other records of Burns’s contemporaries and to the Burns tradition embalmed in the biographies and standard editions. When I started I had therefore everything to learn, but nothing to unlearn, and my basic impression of the poet and his work was founded on intimate acquaintance with his own words, and not on what other people had said about him.

The large number of new documents which have turned up in recent years replaces conjecture with certainty in many once disputed episodes in Burns’s career. We need no longer depend on libellous Saunders Tait for details of William Burnes’s troubles at Lochlie; the chronology of the poet’s Edinburgh peccadillos is fairly clear; we know why Mrs. Dunlop broke off her correspondence. The verification and completion of the texts of more than three-fourths of Burns’s own letters is only a part of the fresh material. Collateral documents ranging from Elizabeth Paton’s discharge of her claim against Burns to the almost complete correspondence of two of his most intimate friends are now available, and I have used them freely. I have also drawn upon other sources not fully utilized in the past. Most biographers, for instance, have contemned the so-called ‘Train MS.’ in Edinburgh University library. This collection of notes on Lockhart’s Life of Burns consists mainly of anecdotes deriving ultimately from the poet’s friend, John Richmond. It has been repudiated in toto for no better reason, seemingly, than that Richmond told a story about one Mary Campbell which does not tally with the romantic account of Highland Mary, and was mistaken in the identity of a lady who once called at Burns’s lodgings in Baxter’s Close. Against these two doubtful items I set the fact that the author of the notes so accurately described unpublished letters and verses which he had seen that every one of them since published can be instantly identified. I base no major conclusions on this MS., but I can see no justification for ignoring it.

I need not enumerate the volumes of biography, history, and memoirs which have contributed background materials. They are listed in all the standard bibliographies. The one great addition to the older lists is the Journals of James Boswell, which have furnished graphic details of Scottish life. I hasten to add, however, that Chapter I is not intended as a complete survey of eighteenth-century Scotland. Even had completeness been possible in the space at my disposal, it would have been useless to attempt to repeat what Professor H. W. Thompson has so superbly done in A Scottish Man of Feeling. Hence I have limited myself to those aspects of national life which bore directly upon Burns, as I have also done in considering the influence of contemporary literature. The eighteenth century was not all ‘elegance’, but it was the elegant authors, and not Swift, Fielding, and Johnson, who appealed to Burns.

Lest British readers charitably assume that I sin through ignorance, I ought perhaps also to add that in writing of Burns’s world I have not hesitated to equate some of its social and political aspects with their twentieth-century American analogues. To describe a dead world in dead terms seems a poor way of revivifying it. My omission of footnotes is likewise deliberate. In a score of articles in various journals during the past decade I have presented, and fully documented, the evidence on many controversial points. The articles evoked an almost passionate apathy; nevertheless they, and their footnotes, are there if anyone cares to look them up. Furthermore, nearly all the source documents I have used are now in print, despite the efforts of Burns’s self-appointed literary executors to suppress certain of them. On two points I recant some of my earlier statements: I know now that the circumstances of Burns’s quarrel with the Riddells are not so clear as I once thought them, and Mr. Stanley Cursiter of the Scottish National Gallery has given me reason to doubt my identification of the miniature portrait belonging to Mr. Oliver R. Barrett.

Transcripts of most of the unpublished documents I have used are included in Mr. Robert T. Fitzhugh’s Cornell University dissertation, ‘Robert Burns as Seen by his Contemporaries’ (1935). I am deeply indebted to Mr. Fitzhugh for the use of this material and of other documents he has discovered more recently, chief among them the letter in which Robert Ainslie described to Agnes M’Lehose his visit to Ellisland in October, 1790. In addition to the Train MS., above mentioned, Mr. Fitzhugh’s thesis includes numerous letters by Burns’s contemporaries, of which the most important are the forty-one which passed between John Syme and Alexander Cunningham from 1789 to 1797. On publication in the Burns Chronicle these letters were considerably expurgated, the deletions including details of the Caledonian Hunt’s revelry in Dumfries and the most graphic description which has yet come to light in connection with Burns of a wet evening over the punchbowl.

Many other people have helped me in the work. My wife typed most of it in its original form, clarified doubtful points by debating them, and did her best to restrain the wilder excesses of Ph.D. diction. My colleague, Winfield H. Rogers, read the manuscript, and made many useful comments. A famous British firm gave me free permission to use one of Burns’s bawdier letters, but after I published it they were taken to task by one of the literary executors above mentioned. Since they found it easier to repudiate a foreigner than to face the wrath of a compatriot, I shall not embarrass them by repeating my thanks here. I am indebted to Col. Sir John Murray, D.S.O., for use of the original MS. of Burns’s journal of his Border tour. Mr. Davidson Cook, Mr. George W. Shirley, and Mr. John M’Vie have all shared their Burns discoveries with me, and Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, Mr. Gabriel Wells, and the late Mr. Charles Sessler renewed my obligations to them by allowing me to collate MSS. which came into their hands after my edition of the Letters was published. And finally, I owe a still deeper renewal of gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, to whose grant-in-aid this present volume owes its appearance.

De L. F.