Nor did his paternal emotions dissipate themselves in rejoicings over birth. Testimony abounds of his devotion to his children, his concern over their proper education, his anxiety for their futures. James Gray on evening visits in Dumfries found him explaining poetry to the eldest boy and hearing him recite his lessons; Maria Riddell was impressed by his constant devotion to the children’s welfare. But towards their mothers, once the fancy had passed, he was indifferent. ‘I am very sorry for it, but what is done is done’, he said of Meg Cameron, and though Clarinda’s rebuke stung him into something like remorse for his treatment of Jenny Clow, even there his last thought was for his son: ‘I would have taken my boy from her long ago, but she would never consent.’ The one possible exception to his generalization was Jean Armour, but Jean’s later history belongs elsewhere, beside Clarinda’s.
In brief, Burns’s experience among women up to his departure for Edinburgh had made him the ‘magerfu’’ man Sentimental Tommy had longed to be. His love-making might involve him in tangles which he was neither astute nor callous enough to avoid, but he had found his attraction enhanced by his reputation as a dangerous man. He had learned the value of aggressiveness; he had not learned finesse. When he met ladies his lack sooner or later became painfully evident.
Among women of the upper classes he was at his best in association with those whose interest was motherly rather than actually or potentially amorous. Before going to Edinburgh he had charmed middle-aged Mrs. Stewart of Stair as well as mature Mrs. Lawrie, wife of the minister of Loudoun, and had begun with Mrs. Dunlop a correspondence which ended only on his deathbed. In its progress this friendship reveals much of what was best in his relations with women; in the estrangement which interrupted it it reveals also his shortcomings. Since, moreover, it is the only one of his friendships in which both sides of the correspondence have been preserved, no guess-work is required in tracing its rise and decline.
Frances Anna Wallace Dunlop belonged by both birth and marriage to the old landed gentry of Scotland, and claimed collateral descent from Sir William Wallace. In the autumn of 1786 her mind was ‘in a state which, had it long continued my only refuge would inevitably have been a mad-house or a grave; nothing interested or amused me; all around me served to probe a wound whose recent stab was mortal to my peace, and had already ruined my health and benumbed my senses.’ Grief at her husband’s recent death had something to do with it, but the chief wound was her eldest son’s extravagance and marital scandals. About the beginning of November a copy of the Kilmarnock Poems reached her and her reading of them—significantly enough it was ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and other poems based on the genteel tradition of eighteenth-century poetry that won her admiration—roused her to fresh interest in life. ‘The poignancy of your expression’, as she put it, ‘soothed my soul.’ To one reading her letters without reference to her age she often sounds like a decrepit and almost dying woman. Actually when she began writing to Burns she was only fifty-six, and she outlived him by nineteen years. She opened the correspondence with an order for six copies of the poems; the flattered poet could scrape together only five, which he dispatched with a complimentary letter that included the news that he was planning a second edition in Edinburgh. Mrs. Dunlop immediately elected herself one of his chief advisers, and among other things suggested that in revising his poems he should avoid describing her great ancestor as ‘unhappy Wallace’ and should make the Twa Dogs sit down more decorously. Later she offered the two most inept of all the recorded plans for the poet’s future. In February, 1787, she proposed that he should use the proceeds of his Edinburgh subscription to buy a commission in the army. The man who wrote ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ and whose dislike for ‘the lobster-coated puppies’ of the army more than once got him into hot water would have cut a strange figure in any officers’ mess. On April 1, 1789, she suggested his applying for the newly established Professorship of Agriculture at Edinburgh University. The self-taught peasant would have cut a still stranger figure as the colleague of Robertson, Cullen, and Blair.
The history of the first few months of his friendship with Mrs. Dunlop reveals how far Burns was from understanding the finer points of etiquette. To begin with he ignored her suggestions for altering his poems. True, he could do nothing else. Her advice was merely typical of what genteel Scotland thought about his work. To accept all emendations would have reduced his poems to namby-pamby; to accept some and reject others would have doubly offended those whose criticism he ignored. But he should have explained this to Mrs. Dunlop, and did not. Her vexation at the discovery was intensified by an innocent blunder he made in arranging for the delivery of copies she had ordered for her stepmother, the dowager Lady Wallace of Craigie. The copies went instead to the estranged wife of her eldest son, also a Lady Wallace but regarded by her mother-in-law as the worst blemish the family tree had ever suffered.
Their relations were first put on a really cordial basis when Burns visited her at Dunlop House in July, 1787. Annoyance at his social blunders evaporated before the charm of his personality, and thereafter the correspondence on both sides took a new tone of affection and esteem. Her interest in Burns was generous and motherly. She plied him with good advice, which he generally ignored, and frequently added substantial help with both money and influence. Towards her Burns seems to have felt as many a man does towards his mother—she bored him but he loved her. She often accused him, no doubt justly, of not reading her letters. They were long, tedious, and wholly unpunctuated; he probably glanced over them when they arrived and then laid them aside for more careful reading at a leisure hour which never came. But though he seldom answered her questions he took her unreservedly into his confidence—or almost unreservedly. He never did more than hint about Clarinda, but he told her everything about Jean. In fact he must have told almost too much; it is hard otherwise to explain his embarrassment over breaking the news that he had finally married the girl who had borne him ‘twice twins in seventeen months’.
By the beginning of 1788 the friendship was so firmly established as to survive a most humiliating incident. When he visited Dunlop House on his way back from Edinburgh in February his reception was warm and flattering. Mrs. Dunlop’s unmarried daughters were agog with admiration. Miss Rachel was hard at work on a painting of his muse, Coila, as to whose appearance she sought the poet’s expert advice. Miss Keith discussed poetry with him and revealed the somewhat surprising fact that she had never read Gray. Before he left he had promised to lend the ladies his copy of Spenser, a recent gift from William Dunbar of Edinburgh. When a few days later he fulfilled his promise he added to the parcel a copy of Gray as a present for Miss Keith, only to learn that a plebeian poet must not presume too far. Mrs. Dunlop replied that she did not allow her daughter to receive presents from men who were not members of her own family, and proposed either to return the whole book or at most to permit Miss Keith to tear out the pages containing the poems she liked best. That Burns continued in friendship with Mrs. Dunlop after this rebuff is eloquent proof of the esteem in which he held her; he had lampooned others of the gentry for less.
Not that this was the only time when Mrs. Dunlop made him conscious of the difference in their ranks. Her occasional gift of a five-pound note, though usually tactfully designated as for some special purpose or occasion, always hurt his pride—the more so because he could not deny that he needed the money. He silently drew the line, however, when she proposed, in one of those fits of economy which sometimes afflict the well-to-do, that he help to sell some decorative fringe which she had been manufacturing. Over this as over others of his sins of omission she displayed an irritability more like a schoolgirl’s than a grandmother’s; most schoolgirlish in its evanescence. A thorough scolding which sounded like a total breach of relations would be countered by some new poems or new compliments from Burns, and her next letter would contain a five-pound note for the latest baby.
Though as Burns became more heavily burdened with labour and responsibility his letters grew shorter and fewer than at the peak of the correspondence during the summer of 1788, no serious rift appeared until December, 1792. When it came it was the result of Burns’s pride working in combination with his want of tact. Among the servants on Mrs. Dunlop’s estate was a milkmaid named Jenny Little, whom Burns’s success had inspired to burst into rime. Burns had already endured a good deal of her output, both from manuscripts sent to him by Mrs. Dunlop and from a pilgrimage of adoration which Jenny had made to Ellisland in 1790—an unsuccessful pilgrimage, for she had found the poet laid up with a broken arm and in no mood for entertaining an aspiring poetess. When Burns reached Dunlop in 1792 he found his patroness’s interest in her protégée still unshaken. With her assistance Jenny had recently printed her poems, and Mrs. Dunlop produced the volume with the request that Burns give his opinion of certain of the verses which she pointed out. He said, ‘Do I have to read all those?’ in a tone which she afterwards described as the equivalent of a slap in the face.
It was supreme tactlessness. Burns was bored and showed it. A more politic man would have waded through the verses however much his jaw might ache with suppressed yawns. But boredom was not the worst aspect of the incident from Burns’s point of view: his pride was wounded. Of all his patrons in the upper ranks of society Mrs. Dunlop alone had kept up her interest in him and had appeared to treat him as an equal. Now she unconsciously revealed that she saw no essential difference between his writing and Jenny Little’s. To her he was after all merely a peasant poet with the accent on the adjective; the difference between him and Jenny Little was a difference in degree and not in kind. Both wrote in dialect; she failed to see that one wrote Scots poetry and the other Scots twaddle.