The incident illustrates once more what Maria Riddell meant when she described Burns as devoid in great measure of refinement and social graces. The abrupt and masterful manner, successful with the girls of his own original class, sooner or later annoyed other ladies besides the Duchess of Gordon. Mrs. Dunlop, however, did not allow her vexation to cause an immediate coolness; she contented herself with a lengthy silence followed by an explanation of her reasons for being offended. Yet when the real break came two years later Burns’s unbridled tongue and pen were again at fault. Mrs. Dunlop heartily disapproved of his sympathy with the French Revolution, and had warned him more than once to drop the subject in his letters. Inasmuch as four of her sons and one grandson were or had been in the army and two of her daughters were married to French royalist refugees, Burns should have known that her sympathies would be Tory. Yet in face of her warnings he wrote in January, 1794, the most outspoken of all his political remarks, describing Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as a perjured blockhead and an unprincipled prostitute who had met their deserved fate at the hangman’s hands, and adding a guarded hope that revolutionary principles might have more scope in England. This time Mrs. Dunlop broke off the correspondence. Though Burns made two attempts during the next year to reopen it, she maintained dogged silence until his pathetic letter of farewell, written on his deathbed, at last broke down her reserve. Her letter of reconciliation was almost the last message which reached him before his death. For a century charitable biographers conjectured that the estrangement must have been due to the lady’s hearing reports that Burns was living an evil life in Dumfries. The recovery of the complete text of his letter of January, 1794, revealed the simple truth that the breach resulted from nothing more serious than a failure in tact. There, as always, his trouble came because he had not taken heed to his ways, that he offend not with his tongue.
The same trouble underlay his relations with other women of a rank above his own—Margaret Chalmers, Agnes M’Lehose, and Maria Riddell, though in different ways and different degrees. With Margaret Chalmers, indeed, he maintained for a couple of years the nearest approach he ever made to a non-flirtatious friendship with a woman of his own age, but of the three just named this clever daughter of a gentleman farmer in Ayrshire was the least removed in station from himself. Unfortunately, only Burns’s side of the correspondence survives, and that in fragments. Apparently it began, as usual, with love-making, but when Margaret gently put a stop to that—probably by telling Burns that she was already engaged to Lewis Hay, whom she married in 1788—their relation ripened into a genuine friendship which produced what Cromek rightly called some of the best letters Burns ever wrote. The poet took her unreservedly into his confidence about his troubles with Creech and his anxiety over his future, so that his three or four letters to her during the height of his correspondence with Clarinda come like a breath of bleak but pure air in that hothouse atmosphere. But the friendship ended, apparently through Burns’s neglect. Two years after her marriage he sent regards to her through another friend, and called himself a wretch for not writing her, but seemingly he could not write when he felt that his confidences might be shared with her husband. An estranged husband would not have mattered, as his flirtation with Agnes M’Lehose proved.
The Clarinda episode has more prominence in most accounts of Burns than it deserves. In its beginning and growth it was in fact quite untypical of the man—his one intensive effort to act a part not natural to him. Its development in this way was mainly the result of the accident which threw him back on letter-writing instead of speech in conducting his suit. Agnes M’Lehose when Burns met her was a plump young matron about his own age. Born Agnes Craig of Glasgow and a relative of one of the Lords of Session, she had married in romantic haste at the age of seventeen a young lawyer named James M’Lehose, and when Burns met her had already had eleven years of leisure to repent. Her husband, after abusing and neglecting her and getting into debt and disgrace, had at last been exiled by indignant relatives to Jamaica—that tropical refuge for Britons who had made their native climate too hot for them. His wife, trying to rear three sickly children on a microscopic annuity, had turned for consolation to literature and religion. In the latter she had espoused under the dynamic preaching of the Rev. John Kemp the strictest tenets of Calvinism; in the former she had familiarized herself with the most elegant authors of the day and had taken to versifying occasionally with the fluency and inaccuracy prevalent among women poets prior to Christina Rossetti and Emily Brontë. Like most of Edinburgh in 1787 she had been eager to meet Burns. When at last she did so at a tea-party given by her friend, Miss Erskine Nimmo, she and Burns became so visibly absorbed in each other as to rouse the amusement of the other guests. The poet’s experiences hitherto with young women of the upper classes had been disappointing. They were polite and attentive, but reserved. Here at last was an indubitable lady, and a young and attractive one at that, who displayed something like the enthusiastic attention he had been accustomed to receive from the belles of Mauchline. Before the tea was over Burns had accepted Mrs. M’Lehose’s invitation to a party of her own. If ever a woman threw herself at a man’s head Agnes M’Lehose did, and Burns was not the man to refuse such a challenge. A letter to Richard Brown in the early days of his infatuation leaves no doubt that he thought he had made a conquest; but he had reckoned without Clarinda’s Calvinism and her social traditions.
The affair might have spent itself in a passing flirtation had not chance, in the form of a drunken driver who overturned a coach and dislocated the poet’s knee, confined him to his room for several weeks. His note explaining and deploring his inability to attend the tea-party was answered by one offering sympathy and regret. Burns and Mrs. M’Lehose both wielded free-flowing pens; their correspondence rapidly gained momentum and fervour. By the third exchange of letters she felt it her duty to remind him that she was a married woman. The result may or may not have been what she intended. Assuring her that his intentions were strictly honourable Burns seized the opportunity to express far more ardent chivalry and devotion than he would probably have ventured on had she been free. In reply she suggested their writing under Arcadian pseudonyms—no doubt as evidence of the strictly Platonic nature of their sentiments; displayed her acquaintance with The Spectator by calling herself Clarinda; and suggested Sylvander for Burns. Having thus safely wrapped their correspondence in asbestos they relaxed in a vapour-bath of emotion.
Less than three weeks after Burns’s accident he was assuring Clarinda that she was a gloriously amiable fine woman and was promising life-long devotion. But he was not admitting her as yet into his inner doubts and perplexities. Margaret Chalmers was the only woman who shared those. In fact both Sylvander and Clarinda seemed to have reserved their more intimate communications for personal speech. Apparently not until their long-deferred second meeting in January did Burns tell her about Jean and his children and Clarinda give him the whole tale of her unhappy marriage. She also sought in both speech and writing to convert him to Mr. Kemp’s particular brand of Calvinism. But here even at the height of his infatuation she failed. The most she got was a partial recantation of his liking for the heroic qualities of Milton’s Satan.
So long as communication was limited to pen and ink the affair for Burns was little more than a literary exercise. After they began to meet it became different and, in its effects on him, worse. Physical nearness could not fail to stir a man of his temperament. Soon their conversation was supplemented by caresses which Clarinda, however, managed to keep within bounds. As a result, Burns left these interviews with his blood at fever heat. A servant-girl named Jenny Clow, successor to the Meg Cameron of the previous winter, provided the consummation which Clarinda denied, and in due course added yet another to his growing list of paternal, legal, and emotional perplexities.
Clarinda was of course unaware of Jenny’s existence, but she soon had other reasons for being uncomfortable. Edinburgh was not a city in which a gentlewoman could be indiscreet and get away with it. More than a dozen years later Euphemia Boswell told Joseph Farington that Edinburgh’s chief drawback was that everybody knew all his neighbours’ affairs. The poet’s visits to the Potterrow were freely discussed. Lord Craig heard of them and was annoyed by his kinswoman’s indiscretion; the Rev. Mr. Kemp heard of them and felt it his duty to admonish his parishioner. When Clarinda confided these troubles to Burns they of course roused him to new fervours of knight-errantry. Moreover, other agitations were intensifying the emotional stress of the love affair. A great lady named Mrs. Stewart who was expected to help his Excise project chose to lecture him on the error of his ways; rumours were afloat that William Creech was insolvent; above all there was bad news from Mauchline. Jean’s parents had this time chosen the heavy melodramatic role and had bidden their erring daughter not to darken their doors again. She was being sheltered by friendly Mrs. Muir of Tarbolton Mill, but her future was black. In these circumstances it is unjust in the extreme to judge Burns’s conduct by the cool standards of sobriety and sanity. The man was in such a state of frenzy that he cannot be held accountable for his words nor even for all his actions.
What had begun as a flirtation and had continued, in part at least, as a piece of play-acting had by the middle of February become an imbroglio. Burns and Clarinda, both of them sentimentalists whose roused emotions were stronger than their reason, had gone so far that they could no longer regard their relations as simple friendship. By the time Burns set out on the 18th for Mauchline by way of Glasgow he had indulged in a perfect delirium of sentiment and rash vows. If he had not actually pledged himself to wait until James M’Lehose should be considerate enough to die and leave Clarinda free to marry Sylvander it at least appears that she expected him to wait. Meanwhile they were to write to each other every day.
The artificial and hothouse nature of the affair is fully demonstrated by the change which came over Burns’s letters as soon as removal from Edinburgh plunged him into the chilly air of everyday. The promise of a daily letter was the first to fail. Burns reached Glasgow on the evening of the 18th to find Richard Brown awaiting him at the Black Bull Inn in the company of young William Burns, who had ridden up from Mauchline with his brother’s horse. Before settling to a convivial evening Burns managed to dispatch a hurried note to Clarinda, but it was four days before he found time to write again. His next letter shows how effectively those four days had brought him back from a sentimental dream-world to crude reality. Doubtless William had brought the latest bulletins about Jean, but no hint of them was passed on to Clarinda. A feverish day of entertainment among the prosperous weavers of Paisley was followed by two days of more decorous pleasure at Dunlop House and then by another wild bout at Kilmarnock. The letter from Kilmarnock is devoted mainly to a broadly humorous account of his Paisley host’s troubles with a daughter who had been to boarding school, a son who wanted a latchkey, and himself who thought it better to re-marry than to burn. Not a word about Jean, scarcely a word about worthy Mrs. Dunlop and none about artistic Miss Rachel and poetic Miss Keith—in short, just such a letter as Burns might have written to Bob Ainslie or Alexander Cunningham, and in comparison with all the previous Clarinda correspondence as inappropriate as Falstaff in love.
But this letter jars on the reader only because it is wrong in its context. Two which he wrote after his arrival at Mauchline on the 23rd jar for a different reason. Only one of these, however, was to Clarinda. She had given him a couple of little shirts for Baby Robert, who was being cared for at Mossgiel. As soon as he had delivered these and seen his family, Burns set off to interview ‘a certain woman’ at Tarbolton Mill. ‘I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her! I, while my heart smote me for the prophanity, tried to compare her with my Clarinda: ’twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender Passion. I have done with her and she with me.’