Pride and Passion: Robert Burns, 1759-1796

by J. De Lancey Ferguson

Throughout the trip Nicol’s conduct was the same; he even snatched Burns away before breakfast from the home of his cousin, James Burness of Montrose. The Highland tour, though he did not then realize it, was Burns’s last opportunity to enlist the active friendship of people whose influence might have changed his life. His failure was largely Nicol’s fault. Reports of his abrupt and ungracious conduct undoubtedly came back to Edinburgh and contributed to the comparative neglect he suffered during his second winter in the city. Edinburgh was too small a place for misconduct to hide in; every lawyer in the old Parliament House would have heard that a servant girl had brought suit against the Ayrshire Bard; the stories from the Highlands, losing nothing in the telling, would add to the swelling tide of hostile gossip. The talk, indeed, reached so far, and was believed so implicitly, that not even death could alter Edinburgh opinion. Cunningham’s efforts to interest prominent citizens in the subscription for Burns’s widow and children met repeated snubs and refusals; to this day, despite the monument on the Calton Hill, the city pays only a half-hearted tribute to his memory.

Of course all blame for the hostile talk cannot be shifted to Nicol, or even to Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow. Burns was indiscreet enough to start plenty of tales without help. But his too long stay unfortunately predisposed many people to believe the worst not only of his conduct in the city but afterwards. Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart, for instance, both accepted at face value the second-hand reports of Burns’s alleged misdoings in Dumfries, and wrote him off their books. For years anecdotes showing Burns in an absurd or discreditable light circulated in Edinburgh. Some may have been true; others were malicious distortions which point the direction taken by city opinion. Thus Lockhart told how Hugh Blair had suggested, when a party of gentlemen were discussing possible changes in the Kilmarnock Poems, that ‘tidings of salvation’ might advantageously be emended to ‘tidings of damnation’. Thereupon the poet, according to Lockhart, embarrassed the professor by asking permission to acknowledge his improvement in a footnote. The basis of the story is truth; its details are not. Blair did suggest the change; Burns did, in conversation with other people, acknowledge his help. But Blair’s suggestion came in writing, as a carefully veiled hint amid other criticisms of the poems. The episode as Lockhart told it is city gossip intended to display Blair as the urbane professor and patron and Burns as a clumsy rustic. Of no importance in itself, the story is symptomatic of the attitude of cultured Edinburgh after the first enthusiasm over Burns had waned.

But no realization of the trouble Nicol was helping to make, no recognition of the schoolmaster’s real character, affected Burns. He continued, after he left the city, to correspond with Nicol; when the obstinate son of Latin Prose got into the row which finally led to his resignation from the High School, Burns championed him against his amiable principal, Dr. Alexander Adam. By christening one of his sons William Nicol, Burns proclaimed his friendship to the world at large, and during the years at Ellisland performed such services as getting appraisals of a farm Nicol was buying, and maintaining a broken-down mare which a horse-coper had passed off on the schoolmaster. The friendship lasted until February, 1793, when Burns was suffering from the rage and humiliation which followed the official inquiry into his revolutionary sympathies. Some report of the matter having reached Nicol, he undertook to rebuke Burns in a would-be facetious vein. The poet was in no mood for rebuke or good advice, facetious or not, and with his heavily satirical reply to Nicol their correspondence ended—too late.

In any case Edinburgh friendships, good or bad, however much he might try to maintain them by correspondence, could not supply companionship when Burns moved to Ellisland. Though on his first visit to Dumfries he had professed himself enchanted with the company he met, he was lonely enough when he actually settled there. He made acquaintances, no doubt ‘men of talent and humour’, among the tradesfolk and professional men of the town, but people like Dr. James Mundell, Walter Auld the saddler, Henry Clint of the King’s Arms, William Hyslop of the Globe Inn, and Thomas Boyd, the contractor who built Ellisland, are names and little more. Apart from his landlord, Patrick Miller, with whom his relations were soon strained, the most congenial friend he had during the three years on the farm was Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, whose estate of Friars Carse marched with Ellisland.

Riddell was a country gentleman turned amateur antiquarian. He had embellished his grounds with a ‘Druid Circle’ and a ‘Hermitage’; he dabbled in numismatics and church architecture. These would scarcely have interested Burns—though he remained in the hermitage long enough to inscribe some verses on the window with Glencairn’s diamond-pointed pencil—but Riddell was also a musician in a small way. Besides composing a few commonplace airs of his own he professed great interest in the traditional music of his country. Here Burns shared his enthusiasm and far excelled his knowledge. The laird, perhaps at Burns’s suggestion, subscribed for Johnson’s Museum and had his set bound with blank interleaves for notes on the songs, their authors, and their history. The number of his annotations gives the measure of his knowledge. Out of four hundred songs, one hundred and seventy have notes. Of these, one hundred and fifty-two were written by Burns, who must have spent many evenings at the task in his friend’s library; eighteen were by Riddell himself or an amanuensis. Sir Walter Scott summed up the laird’s prose writings as ‘truly the most extravagant compositions that ever a poor Man abandoned by providence to the imaginations of his own heart had the misfortune to devise.’

The company which sometimes came to Carse, including as it did men like Joseph Farington the painter—who noted that ‘Mr. Burns the Scottish Poet’ was ‘a middle-sized man, ... black complexioned, and his general appearance that of a tradesman or mechanick’, had ‘a strong expressive manner of delivering himself in conversation’, and knew no Latin—and Francis Grose, the antiquary whose inspiring enthusiasm was the real source of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, was more important than Riddell himself. The laird’s real tastes and aptitudes were convivial. A man of powerful physique and a rather overwhelming robustiousness of manner—William Smellie spoke of ‘his immense fist and stentorian voice’—he succeeded, like so many gentlemen of his day, in wrecking his health at an early age. The notorious ‘Whistle’ contest, in which Riddell and his kinsmen Sir Robert Laurie and Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch undertook to drink each other under the table for the possession of a family heirloom, was probably more typical of the laird’s true aptitudes than the annotations were. Even at that, though, he was outdone by Craigdarroch, who won the whistle by drinking ‘upds. of 5 Bottles of Claret’. Burns, like most of the friends of the contestants, found the incident vastly amusing; Burns’s biographers have argued the question of his real presence at Friars Carse with an almost theological fervour; nevertheless its only interest or value for posterity lies in the light it sheds on Robert Riddell’s character. According to biographical tradition, Robert Riddell was the staid member of the family and his brother Walter the wild one; actually such distinction between them seems as baseless as the kindred legend that Gilbert Burns was a better farmer than his brother. But whether Glenriddell led or followed in the events which for a time estranged the poet from the whole Riddell family, the circumstances of the breach resemble with painful clarity many other episodes in Burns’s contacts with the gentry.

The full story of the ‘Rape of the Sabines’ is Maria Riddell’s more than her brother-in-law’s, but Robert Riddell had a share in the trouble. During 1792 and 1793, when Walter Riddell and his wife Maria were occupying the estate of Goldielea or Woodley Park, family relations were not always harmonious. At a guess, Walter wanted to borrow from his elder brother the funds to complete payment for Woodley Park; at a guess, the wives failed to charm each other. Whatever the causes, by the autumn of 1792 Burns had to assure Maria that he would listen to no stories about her from Glenriddell—and presumably also from Glenriddell’s wife. Yet for another year or more the poet managed to stay on good terms with both families. The year 1793 was, poetically and flirtatiously, the highest point of Burns’s friendship with Maria; the same year produced asseverations of friendship as ‘ardent & grateful’ on Burns’s part as Robert Riddell’s was ‘kind and generous’. In leisure moments the poet was transcribing a collection of his letters as a companion volume to the collection of unpublished verse he had given the laird in 1791. On Christmas day he was still transcribing. On January 12, 1794, his quarrel with Maria had reached its climax. Somewhere between those two dates had occurred the mysterious brawl in which Robert Riddell’s part is still a matter of controversy.

If Robert Riddell was the host, who, by compelling Burns to drink more than he wished to, reduced the poet to a state in which he insulted his hostess, the laird’s conduct admits of small excuse; if, as report has it, the scene occurred at Woodley Park and Robert Riddell subsequently took up the quarrel, he is even less excusable. Whichever version one accepts, Riddell was displaying innate snobbishness towards a man he considered, after all, a social inferior. If he was the host, realization of his own share in the matter should have made him charitable; if his brother was the host, Glenriddell was indulging in violent and uncalled-for partisanship. He held, it would seem, the same theory of a gentleman’s privileges as was enunciated a few years later by Sir John Graham Dalyell: ‘I am a gentleman, and I will be treated as such; and if any person presumes to pervert my meaning in any way whatever, if his rank is not equal to mine I will kick him; and if it is equal I will shoot him.’ Burns, as a plebeian, was kicked. There is a little satisfaction in knowing that the poet held to his resolution not to apologize to his host. The ‘Remorseful Apology’ supposed to have been addressed to a Riddell was really sent, early in 1796, to a Mr. S. Mackenzie. Four months after the quarrel Glenriddell was dead, still unreconciled to the poet who had done more for him than he could ever have done for the poet. A loud blustering squire, a hollow and unsubstantial mind; that was Robert Riddell.

For the last five years of his life Burns’s social world centred in Dumfries. About it cluster dark stories and darker hints, in the effort to refute which the poet’s defenders have sometimes been led to dangerous extremities of special pleading. The truth is that Burns in Dumfries was neither better nor worse than Burns in Tarbolton and Mauchline. Such a report as James Gray’s of finding Burns reading poetry with his children and hearing the older boys recite their lessons does not refute the tales of boisterous revelry in taverns; both are true. The sole difference is that Burns in Tarbolton was an unimportant young man amid a group of other youths; in Edinburgh he was partly lost in the crowds; in Dumfries he was a prominent figure whose every action was noted. He did not degenerate in Dumfries, but neither did he become a chocolate seraph.

Fortunately it is no longer necessary to rely on conjecture and second-hand reports in studying Burns’s last years. The letters which passed between two of his most intimate friends, John Syme of Dumfries and Alexander Cunningham of Edinburgh, are now available to replace guess-work with facts. Of all the friends of Burns’s last years, Syme is now the one who emerges most clearly, and with most credit to himself. A man of good education, a college friend of Dr. James Currie, the poet’s first biographer, Syme regarded Dumfries as a place of exile in which Burns’s society was almost the only redeeming feature. Having lost his small paternal estate of Barncailzie near Kirkcudbright, he had managed to recoup his fortunes by getting appointed to the sinecure post of Collector of Stamps at Dumfries. He first met Burns in 1788, but not until two years later did they become intimate. Syme was a man of sentiment in the best tradition of Henry Mackenzie and The Sorrows of Werther. He went into raptures over thunderstorms and desolate scenery; he read Zimmermann’s Treatise on Solitude; he thought Clarinda’s the finest love-letters ever written. Rhapsodic and absent-minded, he was the sort who could set off on a long-planned hunting-trip and find on arriving at his destination that he had forgotten his dogs. Maria Riddell paid warm tribute to his good head and excellent heart, but added that in matters of business he wanted method: ‘He is always in a labyrinth of papers and accounts, and, somewhat like the cuttlefish, he obscures himself altogether in a mist of his own creating.’