In letter-writing at least the friendship with Maria reached perihelion in the autumn of 1793. Walter was then in the West Indies, trying to raise money on his estate there, and Maria was living alone at Woodley Park with her books, her music, and two baby daughters. By this time Burns was ponderously flirtatious. Maria was the first and fairest of critics, the most amiable and most accomplished of her sex, and it was the final proof of his unhappy lot that when he was in love ‘Impossibility presents an impervious barrier to the proudest daring of Presumption, & poor I dare much sooner peep into the focus of Hell, than meet the eye of the goddess of my soul!’ At least one impassioned lyric which originally began ‘The last time I cam o’er the moor And passed Maria’s dwelling’ had been composed and submitted to the lady’s criticism accompanied by a postscript which transparently disclaimed personal application. In Walter’s absence, many of their meetings during this autumn were at the homes of mutual friends or at the little receptions which Maria held between the acts in her box at the theatre. These latter, however, were sometimes subject to interruptions. On at least one occasion Burns found an army officer—‘a lobster-coated puppy’—already in possession, and withdrew without even announcing himself. Maria chided him for his failure to appear and invited him formally to share her box at the next performance; he kept her supplied with all his latest lyrics, including those addressed to Clarinda.
It would be a mistake to take Burns’s impassioned avowals too seriously. Maria was a young and fascinating woman of the type which pleases men better than it does members of her own sex, and Burns thoroughly enjoyed her conversation. To the pleasures of intellectual intercourse her company added a subdued erotic stimulation which he expressed in the only language he knew. The very frankness of his remarks and Maria’s calm acceptance of them is proof that they were neither meant nor taken literally.
And then came the breach seemingly inevitable in Burns’s relations with every woman of higher station. Its details are still obscure. Even its exact date cannot be determined, though it must have been in Christmas week of 1793. The traditional story is that Burns was dining at Woodley Park and that the men’s talk over their wine somehow got round to the Rape of the Sabines. It was drunkenly agreed that on returning to the drawing-room the men should stage a burlesque of the episode. They did, and Burns, singling out his hostess as his prey, put too much ardour into the game. Mrs. Carswell interprets the thing as a deliberate rag on the part of the other men to get Burns to make a fool of himself. Such at any rate was the result. After a stormy scene during which some of the other ladies present tried to intercede for the poet he was ignominiously expelled. The next day he grovelled in contrition before the offended lady in the painfully humiliating ‘letter from Hell’. She refused to be placated and after two more abortive efforts on Burns’s part the breach between them was complete.
This accepted story leaves unexplained several important details. Foremost among them is the fact that in his apology Burns blames his host for constraining him to drink more than he wished to. Maria had told Smellie in November that Walter Riddell was in the West Indies and was not expected back until spring. On January 12th, when the breach with Burns had already occurred, she again mentioned her husband’s absence. If these letters were correctly printed by Smellie’s biographer, Walter Riddell could not have been the host; therefore the scene could not have occurred at Woodley Park. The alternative explanation is that it really happened at Friars Carse, with Robert and Elizabeth Riddell in the roles usually assigned to Walter and Maria. In this case Maria, hearing of Burns’s conduct, must have undertaken to discipline him.
Whatever the circumstances, Burns’s subsequent conduct was inexcusable. During the early spring of 1794 he wrote several epigrams on Maria which are utterly caddish, lacking alike in wit and decent feeling. One of them he even offered to a London newspaper, the editor of which had sense enough to reject it. He also wrote the long, dull, and vulgar parody of Pope which bears the title ‘Esopus to Maria’ and which attacks everything about Mrs. Riddell from her hair to her morals. This last was meant for the ‘quite private’ delectation of John Syme and one or two other intimates, but even if Burns had published it his conduct could not have appeared in much worse light. The epigrams and the ‘Monody on a Lady Famed for Her Caprice’ are enough in themselves to put it beyond condoning.
While Burns was thus exhibiting the worst side of his nature, his victims’ circumstances were changing. Walter Riddell had returned from the Indies without the money he had gone to raise, and in the course of the spring Woodley Park was repossessed by its former owner, Walter forfeiting his £1000 deposit on the purchase price as well as all that he had laid out in improvements. On April 21st Robert Riddell died, and Friars Carse was put on the market, the relations between the two families being so uncordial that Elizabeth Riddell refused any settlement which would leave her brother-in-law in possession of the estate. Walter and Maria attempted the usual expedient of impoverished gentry—a prolonged stay on the Continent—but found their way barred by the armies of the French Revolution. Accordingly after a few months in England they returned to the neighbourhood of Dumfries to resume life on a much reduced scale. They settled at Tinwald House, a tumble-down estate near Lochmaben, or rather Maria settled, for her husband was absent most of the time. In May, 1795, they moved again, this time to Halleaths, between Lochmaben and Lockerbie, where they remained until they left Scotland forever in 1797. How much Maria had heard of Burns’s conduct towards her no one but herself knew, and she never told. When Currie published some of the letters referring to the quarrel she affected complete ignorance of their relation to herself, though it is hard to believe that some kind friend had not shown them to her.
If Burns showed the worst side of his nature in the quarrel, Maria showed the best of hers in the reconciliation. Early in 1795 she made the first move by sending him a book she had heard he wished to read. He replied in a formal note in the third person which nevertheless welcomed the overture and opened the way for further intercourse. By the beginning of May he was writing in his old vein of flirtatious gaiety and even confiding to Maria about the mysterious Reid miniature of himself—mysterious because no one knows for whom he had it painted, nor why. The woman who quarrelled with Burns in 1794 may have been capricious, and have pushed her rigour further than was wise in dealing with a man of Burns’s temperament. After all, twenty-one is not infallible even when feminine and married. But the woman who reinstated Burns in her good graces in 1795, after his caddish attacks upon her, was certainly not petty.
The renewed friendship had not long to live. Shadows of another sort soon began to fall across it, for Burns’s health was breaking. A note written at the end of May to accompany the loan of the Reid miniature mentioned that he was so ill as scarcely to be able to hold pen to paper; a month later he feared that his health was gone forever. The autumn brought further affliction in the death of his little daughter, and it was to Maria that he uttered the only existing record of his grief: ‘That you, my friend, may never experience such a loss as mine, sincerely prays R B.’
And so, through bereavement, illness, and despair, the passionate, irritable poet and the vivacious young woman of the world drew towards their last meeting. The bleak little watering-place, the Brow Well on the Solway, was the scene. Maria’s health also was bad, and she evidently, like Burns, lacked the funds to take her to a better resort. On the 5th of July, 1796, she sent her carriage for Burns: not until she saw him did she realize how serious his condition was.
He was dying, and knew it. His overdriven heart, which had never wholly recovered from the strain of doing a man’s work on insufficient food at the age of fourteen, was giving out, and he was hastening his end according to the best medical advice in Dumfries. A doctor who thought that angina was ‘flying gout’ had ordered sea bathing, and the dying poet was plunging himself daily in the chilly waters of the Solway, as he had earlier in life sought to cure fainting-fits in a tub of cold water at his bedside. Maria was startled by the visible stamp of death on the features of the emaciated man who tottered from her carriage, and her concern was increased by his almost total inability to eat. But the presence of a young and attractive woman could still, as always, rouse Burns to his best efforts, and his talk might even have been gay—after his preliminary, ‘Well, Madam, have you any messages for the other world?’—had Maria been able to forget his haggard countenance long enough to reply in kind.