As it was, they had ‘a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects.’ The man who had never lied about himself, to himself or others, now frankly faced the fact that he was dying. And the presence of a sympathetic and intelligent listener urged him on to speech about the matters nearest his heart. Two things perturbed him on the brink of the grave—anxiety for his family, and anxiety for his fame. His eldest son was not yet ten; there were three younger, and Jean was hourly expecting a fifth; at least two others needed a father’s help to lighten the stigma of illegitimacy. And as for his literary reputation—

‘He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise, and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to the injury of his future reputation: that letters and verses written with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity or malevolence when no dread of his resentment would restrain them or prevent the censures of shrill-tongued malice or the insidious sarcasms of envy from pouring forth all their venom to blast his fame.’

Could Burns have looked into the future, the prospect would have deepened the pain in his harassed soul. His anxiety for his family would have been allayed, to be sure, but not even in his darkest hour could he have visualized the future of his personal and literary fame. He foresaw attacks of his enemies; he did not foresee the cowardice or treachery of his friends. He need not have worried about his trivial or unguarded writings, for time automatically washes away the sand and leaves the gold, if gold there be, and the publication of trifling letters cannot harm their writer if the pattern of his soul itself is not trifling. That spiritual descendants of Holy Willie should deplore his best and strongest work and shake their heads over passions of which their impotent pulses were incapable, that enemies eager for revenge and underlings eager for drink should lie about their relations with him—these things were to be expected. But that Bob Ainslie, turned pious, should exemplify his own piety by preserving and circulating Burns’s worst letters, that George Thomson should not only ignore his dying wishes but even, before his corpse was in the grave, rush into print with a distorted and melodramatic version of his last years which would set the tone of biographies for a century to come, that Gilbert should lack the courage to deny stories which he knew to be false—all this, and much more, was mercifully hidden from him. But it would have warmed his heart to know that the one intimate friend who would come before the world with a truthful account of his character, extenuating nothing, and setting nothing down in malice, was Maria Riddell, on whom he had made unforgivable attacks, and who nevertheless had forgiven him. The woman with whom the dying poet talked that day until the distant bulk of Criffel turned dark against the sunset, and the chill tide in which he had been ordered to bathe ebbed away from the dismal flats of the Solway, was to prove herself the most devoted friend of her sex he had ever had, Jean Armour always excepted.

V

LIVELIHOOD

To Burns in the vigour of his early manhood the question of livelihood seemed easily answered. He was a good enough ploughman to be assured of the porridge and the few shillings a week which a skilled labourer could earn on a Scottish farm. There was no degradation in such service. The labourers, like the hired help on New England farms, ate with the family and took whatever share in the conversation they were capable of. Moreover, anyone, whatever his rank, who was capable of ‘a sensible crack’ was sure of welcome in households which had either to provide their own entertainment or go without. Not even the prospect of dependent old age held any terrors. The tradition of the blue-gowns, or licensed beggars, still persisted in rural Scotland. An old man past work who could talk interestingly could count on a meal and a place by the fire at almost any farmer’s ingle. Burns seriously thought of this as a possible end of his own life. The expression of the idea in several poems might be dismissed as rhetoric had he not repeated it in the sober prose of his letters. He actually pictured himself as spending his manhood in labour, love-making, and poetry and his old age as a sort of Edie Ochiltree.

Such a vision of course was adolescent. To fulfil it a man must have no dependents. Burns seems to have imagined at first that if he could help to keep the home together until his brothers and sisters were able to establish themselves his responsibilities would end. The liberation of his poetic talent entailed among other things a shrinking from the burdens of marriage on narrow means. His rejected proposal to Alison Begbie had come before his realization of his poetic calling; his rejected offer to Jean Armour in 1786 was the result of sympathy for her condition and not of a desire to settle down. But he soon learned that he could not so simply escape responsibility. His children must be provided for somehow even if he did not marry their mothers. Despite the casualness with which he incurred paternity his parental feelings were strong. ‘Vive l’amour et vive la bagatelle’ sounded well as a motto until it was confronted by the actual problem of helpless lives which owed their existence to him. As a Man of Feeling he could not, even had he wished to, turn his back on them with Don Juan-like callousness. Besides, the law might have something to say in the matter—as Burns learned in the course of four suits or threatened suits by four different women within two years. Unless he chose to flee the country and repudiate his obligations he had to provide himself with settled livelihood.

For a man of his rank and education the possible choices open in 1786 were limited. He could continue as a farmer; he could attempt to support himself by writing, or he could seek a salaried position at home or in the colonies. Each alternative had its drawbacks. By the beginning of 1786 his reputation in the community was such that he could scarcely continue the partnership at Mossgiel, but he lacked the capital necessary for setting up independently elsewhere. The hope of any large financial returns from his poetry seemed too fantastic for consideration; he lacked the training for journalism or hackwork when Grub Street was crowded with penniless university men. There remained the chance of some salaried position. Yet even if he had been temperamentally fitted for a commercial job he was by this time too old. Merchants’ clerks began their apprenticeship as boys in their teens. Burns was twenty-seven. A post in the Excise Service might be feasible but was not easy to get. All government jobs went by favour, and despite the unpopularity of the service among the people at large the number of aspirants so far exceeded the available places that the endorsement of some influential person was almost essential. The same thing was true of India, where the East India Company’s monopoly gave patronage as large a part as it had in the government services. The United States, not yet united, were in economic chaos; Canada was undeveloped. There remained the West Indies, then at the height of a prosperity built on slave labour, where independent planters with Scottish connexions were numerous enough to make it possible for a Scotsman with the necessary introductions to secure some sort of work. The story of Burns’s struggle for livelihood is the story of his efforts in each of the four possibilities open to him.

The West Indian venture was the only one which never came to actual trial. The documents are lost which would settle the date at which Burns began seriously to consider emigration, but his mind was made up at the very beginning of 1786. Through friends in Ayrshire he obtained the offer of a position at thirty pounds a year as clerk and overseer on a Jamaica plantation. The story is still repeated that he published the Kilmarnock Poems to pay his passage-money, but his own contemporary account of the matter is sufficient refutation. He had already arranged to go to Jamaica, his employer to pay his fare and deduct the sum from his first year’s salary, before he decided to print the poems. For Burns emigration was not only flight but almost a death sentence. He had some justification for his feeling. The West Indian climate helped to insure the financial success of a small minority of white immigrants by killing off most of their rivals. He published his poems because he wished, before saying farewell forever to Scotland, to leave behind some tangible memorial. When the publication proved so unexpectedly successful it immediately cancelled his flight.

Burns’s first extant reference to Jamaica is in a letter to John Arnot of Dalquhatswood, which was written in April, 1786, when the subscription for the Poems was well under way. Negotiations were then almost complete: by June 12th Burns was able to announce that the ship was on her way home that was to take him out; on August 14th he explained that he was entering the employ of Charles Douglas of Port Antonio and all that remained to settle was the route by which he was to travel. In view of the time required for exchange of letters between Scotland and the West Indies it is certain that the correspondence with Douglas must have begun in the winter, before the Kilmarnock volume was planned and while a considerable part of it was still unwritten. As the troubles with the Armours thickened during the summer so did Burns’s references to his impending emigration. During July and the first part of August he was announcing that he had booked passage from Greenock to Savannah-la-Mar in the Nancy, sailing about September 1. Then returned Jamaicans advised him that the route was too roundabout, and when the captain of the Nancy notified him that the ship was about to sail, Burns decided that the notice was too abrupt. The Nancy sailed without him, and he transferred his booking to the Bell, which was to sail direct to Port Antonio at the end of September.