The exact date at which Burns composed the ‘Jolly Beggars’ is uncertain—if it was really written after a slumming frolic with John Richmond it must have been in 1785—but the closing episode is either autobiography or prophecy. The Bard, whose sentiments in the closing chorus are definitely Burns’s own, is depicted with a doxy upon either arm. After the stormy spring and summer of 1786 Burns confessed to Robert Aiken that he had plunged into all sorts of riot, Mason meetings, and dissipation, to distract his mind from the humiliation of the Armour affair. What form his dissipation took may reasonably be guessed not only from Burns’s own temperament but from human nature in general. Yet nothing about his relation with Mary Campbell is free of doubt. All that can definitely be proved is that there was a servant-lass of that name to whom Burns apparently addressed certain lyrics and to whom he certainly gave a pair of Bibles bearing peculiar inscriptions. It is useless to rehearse the endless controversy between the romantics to whom Mary Campbell was a Lily Maid of Astolat and the realists to whom she was just another girl who couldn’t say no. But a few facts must be underscored. The critical analysis of the legend made with caustic humour by Henley in 1896 and subsequently elaborated by Professor Snyder has never been rebutted nor even answered. The scripture texts Burns wrote on the fly-leaves of that Bible are such as would have been chosen by a man to whom a frightened girl was appealing for protection and who was impulsively promising it on his word of honour as a man and a Mason. That he also sang Mary’s praises as ‘Highland Lassie’ and in another lyric asked—for poetic effect at least—if she would go to the Indies with him means little, if anything. The enthusiasts prefer to forget that during the same summer Burns said farewell to Eliza Miller in a lyric quite as fervid as any of those addressed to Mary.
Out of the mass of legend and conjecture the only solid facts which emerge are that during this spring of 1786 Burns was having some sort of a love affair with Mary; that she left Ayrshire in May, and that she died in the early autumn. Burns may have turned to her for consolation after the breach with Jean; the affairs may have been simultaneous. Most biographers incline to the sequel theory on the naïve assumption that love affairs, unlike electric batteries, are always mounted in series and never in parallel. In view of the social attitude of the Ayrshire peasantry the question of whether or not Mary was technically chaste is both metaphysical and irrelevant. Burns’s attitude toward the other sex was direct; perhaps the strongest argument for Mary’s chastity would be the complete lack of reference to her in his contemporary letters, were it not for his subsequent description of her as ‘as charming a girl as ever blessed a man with generous love’. Burns ordinarily meant such expressions in the most literal sense. Despite the evidence in the Bibles that he had tried again to do the right thing it is hard to believe that in retrospect Mary would have touched him any more deeply than Jenny Clow or Anne Park later did had it not been for her untimely death. She certainly meant little in May and June of 1786. In the same month in which he gave her the Bible he composed the long and bawdy ‘Court of Equity’; throughout the summer his letters to his intimates mingle execration, devotion, and regret for Jean Armour in precisely the same tones he had used in April. A man who had really found an adequate new love might be supposed to speak of the old one as Burns had spoken of Peggy Thomson in 1784. Resentment of the Armours’ conduct might explain the execration, but hardly the regret and certainly not the devotion. If Burns really intended to make a new start in Jamaica with Mary Campbell, it is strange indeed that he never hinted of it to his friends—unless we accept the tradition, reported at second hand from John Richmond, that Mary was a light-skirts whose character Richmond and some other friends exposed to the poet. In that case, he would have had good reason for silence.
When in October he summed up his situation in a long letter to Robert Aiken it was still Jean who was the cause of his secret wretchedness and who was the source of ‘the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse’. The sole passage in the letter which Snyder thought might apply to Mary—‘I have seen something of the storm of mischief thickening over my folly-devoted head’—may now be interpreted as referring instead to the disconcerting reappearance of Betty Paton as a claimant for support. The sole evidence surviving from 1786, apart from Burns’s lyrics, is his sister’s story, told many years after his death, that one day in October he received a letter which he read with a look of agony and then crushed into his pocket as he silently left the house. Connecting this story with Burns’s later statement that ‘a malignant fever hurried my dear girl to her grave before I could even hear of her illness’, biographers have assumed that the painful letter bore the news of Mary’s death. But this, even granting perfect reliability to Isabella Begg’s memory, is pure assumption. Burns’s sole references to her were written from three to five years after the supposed event. With one exception they were intended for the mystification rather than the enlightenment of Robert Riddell and George Thomson. That exception is the composition of ‘Thou Lingering Star’ and the letter to Mrs. Dunlop which accompanied it—both of them written in a neurotic state close to complete nervous breakdown. The Highland Mary we know is the creation of biographers, and should be suffered to abide in the Never-Never Land of romance. The truth about the Burns of flesh and blood had better be sought in his relations with flesh and blood women.
In these relations there were three main degrees. The foremost group consists of women who profoundly stirred him, and on whom for a time at least he concentrated his intellect and his affections as well as his desires. In this group belong Jean Armour, Margaret Chalmers, Clarinda, and probably Maria Riddell. Next come the women who engaged his passing fancy, and for whom he felt some tenderness, but who did not influence him deeply or long. Among these are Betty Paton, Anne Park, Jean Lorimer, and Jessie Lewars. A woman who appealed to Burns on either of these bases need not have been his mistress; in fact, only three of those named ever yielded to him. But below these was a third group, represented by Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow, who were mistresses and nothing more—the mere conveniences of the moment. These last never roused even a momentary spark of poetry in their lover. Judged purely on the basis of literary by-product, Mary Campbell belongs in the second group, but not in the first. Even her most ardent champion might hesitate to assert that any lyric addressed to her is the equal of ‘Ae fond kiss’ or ‘Of a’ the airts’. Jessie Lewars and Jean Lorimer both inspired better songs than Mary ever did.
But Burns’s tenderness, even for the women who meant most to him, was often of a peculiar sort. Though he told Deborah Davies that ‘Woman is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of precedency among them, but let them all be sacred’, his practice was more accurately summarized in what he said about love in confiding to George Thomson his admiration for Jean Lorimer:
‘... I am a very Poet in my enthusiasm of the Passion.—The welfare & happiness of the beloved Object, is the first & inviolate sentiment that pervades my soul; & whatever pleasures I might wish for, or whatever might be the raptures they would give me, yet, if they interfere & clash with that first principle, it is having these pleasures at a dishonest price; & Justice forbids, & Generosity disdains the purchase!—As to the herd of the Sex, who are good for little or nothing else, I have made no such agreement with myself; but where the Parties are capable of, & the Passion is, the true Divinity of love—the man who can act otherwise than as I have laid down, is a Villain!—’
One fears that Burns remained on these chivalrous heights only when the woman was unattainable; should she yield to him, she would too readily take her place among ‘the herd of the Sex’. Certainly he freely discussed his loves not only among his male friends but with a patroness like Mrs. Dunlop. When, for instance, after his conquering hero’s return to Mauchline in June, 1787, the Armours bade him welcome and Jean succumbed once more, he lost no time in reporting the victory to Smith and Ainslie. To put it briefly, beneath the veneer of sentiment, beneath even the poetic response, Burns’s attitude towards women of his own age was the elemental possessiveness which regards sex primarily as a ribald jest. His sincerest tenderness belonged to no woman as deeply as it did to his children, however or wherever begotten.
Burns never revealed more truly his own feelings than in the ‘Poet’s Welcome to his Bastart Wean’ which hailed the birth of his eldest child, Betty Paton’s daughter. Its mixture of bawdry with affection, of rollicking defiance of the unco guid with exultant pride in paternity, may distress the tender-minded who prefer not to admit the existence in parental relations of even a sublimated carnality, but it is the very essence of Burns himself. His plainest expressions of his love for his children occur not in letters to women but in letters to his most intimate male friends, and often amid flagrant ribaldry. It was not to Mrs. Dunlop that he wrote that Jean’s first twins ‘awakened a thousand feelings that thrill, some with tender pleasure and some with foreboding anguish, thro’ my soul’; it was to Robert Muir, companion of his revels and recipient of broad jests. Robert Aiken was told that the feelings of a father outweighed in Burns all the sound reasoning and all the bitter memories that joined in urging him to carry through the Jamaica project. ‘God bless them, poor little dears!’ he exclaimed to John Richmond on reporting the birth of the twins. Such remarks to men before whom he had no motive for acting a part, are more convincing proof of real feelings than are the dissertations, garnished with quotations from James Thomson’s dramas, on parental anxieties in his letters to Mrs. Dunlop.
Especially notable is the letter he wrote to Bob Ainslie on August 1, 1787, in response to the latter’s announcement of the birth of an illegitimate son. Beginning, ‘Give you joy, give you joy, my dear brother!’ he goes on to say that he has ‘double health and spirits at the news’, and to welcome Ainslie to ‘the society, the venerable Society of Fathers’. There follow eight lines of the metrical version of Psalm 127, obviously quoted with as much sincerity as when he later used it, in quite different context, in writing to John M’Auley. He continues, ‘My ailing child is got better, and the Mother is certainly in for it again, and Peggy [Meg Cameron] will bring me a half Highlandman’, and announces his intention of getting a farm, bringing them all up in fear of the Lord and of a good oak stick, and of being the happiest man alive. Then the letter shifts to snatches of bawdy song, some quoted, others apparently impromptu. This primitive joy in paternity, this exultation over the mere fact of birth, whether the child was his own or another’s, was part of his heritage from the Scottish soil. The same spirit shows three years later in his reply to Mrs. Dunlop’s news that her widowed daughter Mrs. Henri had borne a posthumous son:
‘... I literally, jumped for joy—how could such a mercurial creature as a Poet, lumpishly keep his seat on the receipt of the best news from his best Friend—I seized my gilt-headed Wangee rod, an instrument indispensably necessary in my left hand in the moment of Inspiration & Rapture—and stride—stride—quick & quicker—out skipt I among the broomy banks of Nith to muse over my joy by retail.’