In August Burns returned to Edinburgh, but Creech was either again absent or again coy. Not until October 23 did the publisher at last set his hand to a note promising to pay the sum ‘on demand’. How soon Burns began to ask for payment is uncertain, but by January Creech had delayed and evaded so often that Burns ‘broke measures with [him], and ... wrote him a frosty keen letter. He replied in forms of chastisement’, promised payment on a set date—and broke his promise. To add to the poet’s anxiety, rumours were afloat. It was hinted that Creech was on the verge of bankruptcy; it was also hinted that he had cheated Burns by secretly printing additional copies of the Poems, which he sold for his own profit. Burns bewailed his own fate as a ‘poor, d-mned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool’; two months later ‘that arch-rascal Creech’ was still making promises, and still reneguing. Not until May 30, more than seven months after he had agreed to pay ‘on demand’, did Creech at last part with his hundred guineas. And even then Burns’s troubles were not over. Still another visit to Edinburgh, at the end of February, 1789, was necessary before Creech paid over the final sums due the poet for subscription copies, so that at last he could report to Jean: ‘I have settled matters greatly to my satisfaction with Mr. Creech.—He is certainly not what he should be nor has he given me what I should have, but I am better than I expected.’
The estimate of Creech was temperate enough; indeed, it erred, like Burns’s statement to John Moore that Creech had ‘been amicable and fair’ with him, on the side of charity. It is easy to condone Mackenzie’s blunder and Creech’s sharp bargain on the ground that neither of them could guess the future value of the copyright, but it is impossible to excuse Creech’s postponements of the day of reckoning. Prompt settlement of accounts after the book was published would have sent Burns back to the country with his pockets comfortably lined and with some of the glowing enthusiasm of his first season in Edinburgh still undimmed. By his paltry delays Creech kept the poet in the city until the interest of his fashionable ‘patrons’ had waned, until all the pleasure of publication and fame had evaporated in bitterness and disgust, and until the mere necessities of living must have made considerable inroads on his irreplaceable capital.
Indeed one of the extraordinary facts about Burns’s life in Edinburgh is that he emerged from it without greater depletion of his capital. Contemporary report calls him dissipated. Yet somehow Burns managed to spend nearly a year and a half either in residence in Edinburgh or in journeying to and fro, and still came out with about four hundred and fifty pounds. So far as is known he had no income from July, 1786, when he assigned his rights in Mossgiel to Gilbert, until he reaped his harvest, such as it was, at Ellisland in the autumn of 1788. Even then he netted little, for the outgoing tenant exacted a price of £72 for the standing crops. However great his experience in the distracting ‘task of the superlatively Damn’d—making one guinea do the business of three’—his twenty pounds from the Kilmarnock volume cannot have lasted long, and if there were any gifts except the Earl of Eglinton’s ten guineas and the same sum from Patrick Miller he nowhere mentions them. If Burns dissipated heavily he managed somehow to do it without heavy expenditure, an art few people have ever learned.
The possibility that he received funds from Gilbert even after the deed of assignment must be ruled out. The flow of funds in fact was the other way. The supposedly careful and efficient Gilbert was in constant difficulties at Mossgiel. Robert sent him ten pounds from Edinburgh in the spring of 1787; during the following winter he authorized John Ballantine to pay over to Gilbert about thirty pounds of subscription money then in Ballantine’s hands. And this was only the beginning. The letter to Gavin Hamilton already quoted indicates that Gilbert was so far in arrears with his rent in March, 1788, that Hamilton wanted Burns to sign some sort of a note for him. This Burns refused to do, because he had already lent Gilbert £200—nearly half his receipts from the Edinburgh edition. Whether the previous payments were counted as part of this loan or not is uncertain; probably they were not, for after the poet’s death John Syme declared that Gilbert owed £300, though the legal accounting sets the figure at £200. It seems likely therefore that Gilbert regarded the earlier payments as gifts, and that the sum which Gilbert at last repaid to his brother’s family represented the final loan in 1788. As part of the interest on the loan Burns arranged that Gilbert should pay his mother an annuity of £5 a year and should continue to care for Betty Paton’s daughter. The result was that Gilbert made no cash payment during Burns’s life, and never was able to pay off the principal until he undertook to re-edit the Poems in 1820. Burns had given most substantial proof of his loyalty to his family and in doing so had destroyed his only hope of success in his own venture at Ellisland.
Gilbert and his mother and sisters were not the whole of Burns’s responsibilities. His younger brother William was approaching manhood and turned naturally for support to the celebrity of the family. He appears to have been an amiable but ineffective youth. He had served at least part of an apprenticeship as a saddler, and in the autumn of 1787 Burns made some fruitless efforts to find him a job in Edinburgh. A year or so later William set out to look for employment and held jobs briefly in Longtown, in Newcastle, and finally in London, where he died of typhus and where his funeral was arranged by John Murdoch and paid for by Burns. Burns’s letters to this brother during his year of wandering consist in about equal proportion of exhortations to brace up and be a man and of enumerations of gifts—shoes and shirts and waistcoats and above all money. Burns’s position as family capitalist was no sinecure.
While he was struggling with Creech and trying to keep Mossgiel afloat, Burns was constantly harried by the problem of his own future. The only two possibilities he could see were a farm of his own or a post in the Excise, and for a long time there seemed little chance of achieving either. He had no intention of trying again for public aid through his writing. One subscription might be regarded as a public tribute; a repetition would look like begging. Besides, his common sense told him that a second subscription would have little hope of success unless it came at a long interval after the first and for work of a different character. He had not exhausted his talents, but he had exhausted his novelty. For the rest of his life he steadfastly refused to accept payment for anything he wrote and actually gave away poems which make up two-thirds of the bulk of his collected works. His sole payment for ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ was a dozen copies of the proof-sheets; his payment for Creech’s second edition in 1793—which included ‘Tam’ and a score of other new poems—was twenty presentation copies grudgingly allowed him. His fondness for making gestures of gallant but unwise generosity can hardly be better illustrated than by his dealings with Creech over this edition. The publisher wrote to him in 1791, proposing a reissue of the work and asking Burns to contribute some new poems to it, but without suggesting payment for them. Burns told Cunningham that he had taken a damned revenge of Creech by ignoring his letter. Yet a few months later he relented, and after reminding Creech that the new poems were his own absolute property, turned them over to him without asking any payment except the twenty gift copies. Such a gesture might have shamed some publishers, but Creech merely accepted it as his right. In the same spirit Burns hotly resented George Thomson’s payment of £5 for his contributions to the first number of the Select Scotish Airs, and Thomson, like Creech, felt no compunction at accepting the poet’s quixotic generosity.
On at least two occasions, moreover, Burns was offered pay for journalistic writing in party newspapers. The origin, extent, and duration of his relations with Peter Stuart of the London Star are all obscure, but it is plain that Stuart as a zealous Whig tried to get Burns as a regular contributor. The poet refused. When he struck off a satirical skit he was willing to give it to Stuart, but the only pay he accepted was a free subscription to the paper. Thus he managed to acquire the reputation, injurious to his hopes in government employ, of being a partisan writer without any reward except notoriety. Again in 1794 Patrick Miller, Jr., his landlord’s son who had been put into Parliament at the age of twenty-one, persuaded James Perry of the London Chronicle to offer Burns what for those days was a fair salary if he would come to London and devote his talents to the press. Again Burns refused. He realized well enough that the prosperity of a newspaper was often short-lived and he feared to jeopardize his children’s future by exchanging an assured though meagre income for the chances of the journalistic profession. Besides, the writer in a partisan paper in 1794 was risking jail as well as economic insecurity, as the sedition trials then in progress had proclaimed to all the kingdom.
But if he was not to support himself by writing how was he to support himself? That question hammered in his mind from the time he abandoned the Jamaica project until the early spring of 1788. Even before he went to Edinburgh he had thought of the Excise. But he found his Edinburgh patrons cold to all hints. These gentlemen reasoned simply. Burns was the ploughman poet: ergo, he should continue to plough. The only definite gesture made towards getting him government work was Mrs. Dunlop’s. She offered an introduction to Adam Smith in the hope that Smith might help him to a job in the customs, but the philosopher had left for London the day before Burns presented his letter. Moreover Smith no longer took an interest in much except his own health, and if Burns sought later to renew his application nothing came of it. His most favourable opportunity to cultivate the acquaintance of high officials was lost when he allowed William Nicol to drag him away from Blair Athole, where Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, was one of the guests, and where Henry Dundas was shortly to appear.
Meanwhile an offer of another sort was being pressed upon him. He had been in Edinburgh only a few weeks when the prosperous and enthusiastic Patrick Miller sought his acquaintance. Miller, after a varied career, at sea and as a banker, had retired from business with a comfortable fortune and was devoting himself to miscellaneous experiments. He was the sort of capitalist who is a godsend to struggling inventors, for his enthusiastic imagination enabled him both to visualize the inventor’s aims and to overlook all the practical details and delays which intervene between a project and its fulfilment. His strongest enthusiasm at the moment was the improvement of navigation, but his interests also included agriculture. Not long before Burns came to Edinburgh Miller had bought the run-down estate of Dalswinton near Dumfries, and it was Ellisland, one of the farms on this estate, which he urged upon Burns.
The poet was afraid of it from the start, and for good reason. Miller, he said, was no judge of land, and what Miller thought was an advantageous offer might ruin his tenant. Had Burns been gifted with second-sight he could not have prophesied more accurately. Yet the difficulty he always found in saying ‘No’ to people whose intentions were friendly combined with his own inclinations to keep him from refusing Miller’s offer outright. Farming was the business he knew best, and a farmer’s life he held was the best of lives—if one could live by it—but Mount Oliphant, Lochlie, and Mossgiel had been a triple lesson on the fate of the tenant who undertook a lease without capital enough to stock a farm profitably. Even if the Dalswinton farm were all that Miller thought it, Burns doubted if his literary profits would suffice to give him a start. However, he agreed to look at Ellisland when he reached Dumfries at the end of his Border tour. When he did so he could scarcely have been in the mood for a really critical examination. The savage hospitality he had experienced for the past three weeks had left him jaded and depressed, and the annoyance of being greeted at Dumfries by Meg Cameron’s letter would not sharpen his critical faculties. Even so he could see at a glance that the soil was exhausted and would require long and careful nursing. In fact the only thing to be said for Miller’s offer was that, recognizing the run-down condition of the property, he was offering it at a low rental for the first three years. Fifty pounds per annum for a farm of more than a hundred acres contrasted favourably with the prices in East Lothian, where landlords were asking as much as thirty shillings an acre. Burns went home to Mossgiel without having made up his mind; if discussion with the cautious Gilbert contributed to any decision it was a negative one. Ellisland was too big a risk. He returned to Edinburgh in the fall with his mind made up. He would renew his efforts to secure an Excise commission and would bank the profits of his poems as a reserve fund for the education and security of his children.