Robert Burns

by John Campbell Shairp

When he had resolved on giving up his farm, an arrangement was come to with the Laird of Dalswinton by which Burns was allowed to throw up his lease and sell off his crops. The sale took place in the last week in August (1791). Even at this day the auctioneer and the bottle always appear side by side, as Chambers observes; but then far more than now-a-days. After the roup, that is the sale, of his crop was over, Burns, in one of his letters, describes the scene that took place within and without his house. It was one which exceeded anything he had ever seen in drunken horrors. Mrs. Burns and her family fortunately were not there to witness it, having gone many weeks before to Ayrshire, probably to be out of the way of all the pain that accompanies the breaking up of a country home. When Burns gave up his lease, Mr. Miller, the landlord, sold Ellisland to a stranger, because the farm was an outlying one, inconveniently situated, on a different side of the river from the rest of his estate. It was in November or December that Burns sold off his farm-stock and implements of husbandry, and moved his family and furniture into the town of Dumfries, leaving at Ellisland no memorial of himself, as Allan Cunningham tells us, "but a putting-stone with which he loved to exercise his strength, and 300l. of his money, sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all had augured happiness."

It is not without deep regret that even now we think of Burns's departure from this beautiful spot. If there was any position on earth in which he could have been happy and fulfilled his genius, it would have been on such a farm—always providing that it could have given him the means of a comfortable livelihood, and that he himself could have guided his ways aright. That he might have had a fair opportunity, how often one has wished that he could have met some landlord who could have acted towards him, as the present Duke of Buccleuch did towards the Ettrick Shepherd in his later days, and have given a farm on which he could have sat rent-free. Such an act, one is apt to fancy, would have been honourable alike to giver and receiver. Indeed, a truly noble nature would have been only too grateful to find such an opportunity put in his way of employing a small part of his wealth for so good an end. But the notions of modern society, founded as they are so entirely on individual independence, for the most part preclude the doing and the receiving of such favours. And with this social feeling no man was ever more filled than Burns.

CHAPTER VI.

MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES.

A great change it must have been to pass from the pleasant holms and broomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to a town home in the Wee Vennel of Dumfries. It was, moreover, a confession visible to the world of what Burns himself had long felt, that his endeavour to combine the actual and the ideal, his natural calling as a farmer with the exercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that henceforth he must submit to a round of toil, which, neither in itself nor in its surroundings, had anything to redeem it from commonplace drudgery. He must have felt from the time when he first became Exciseman, that he had parted company with all thought of steadily working out his ideal, and that whatever he might now do in that way must be by random snatches. To his proud spirit the name of gauger must have been gall and wormwood, and it is much to his credit that for the sake of his wife and children he was content to undergo what he often felt to be a social obloquy. It would have been well for him if this had been the only drawback to his new calling. Unfortunately the life into which it led him, exposed him to those very temptations which his nature was least able to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits had somewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power of poetic concentration, before he left Ellisland, Dumfries, and the society into which it threw him, did with increased rapidity the fatal work which had been already begun. His biographers, though with varying degrees of emphasis, on the whole agree, that from the time he settled in Dumfries, "his moral course was downwards."

The social condition of Dumfries at the time when Burns went to live in it was neither better nor worse than that of other provincial towns in Scotland. What that was, Dr. Chambers has depicted from his own youthful experience of just such another country town. The curse of such towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of their inhabitants were either half or wholly idle; either men living on competences, with nothing to do, or shopkeepers with their time but half employed; their only amusement to meet in taverns, soak, gossip, and make stupid personal jokes. "The weary waste of spirits and energy at those soaking evening meetings was deplorable. Insipid toasts, petty raillery, empty gabble about trivial occurrences, endless disputes on small questions of fact, these relieved now and then by a song,"—such Chambers describes as the items which made up provincial town life in his younger days. "A life," he says, "it was without progress or profit, or anything that tended to moral elevation." For such dull companies to get a spirit like Burns among them, to enliven them with his wit and eloquence, what a windfall it must have been! But for him to put his time and his powers at their disposal, how great the degradation! During the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enough in doing his duty as an Exciseman. This could now be done with less travelling than in the Ellisland days, and did not require him as formerly to keep a horse. When the day's work was over, his small house in the Wee Vennel, and the domestic hearth with the family ties gathered round it, were not enough for him. At Ellisland he had sung,—

To make a happy fire-side clime,
For weans and wife,
Is the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.

But it is one thing to sing wisely, another to practise wisdom. Too frequently at nights Burns's love of sociality and excitement drove him forth to seek the companionship of neighbours and drouthy cronies, who gathered habitually at the Globe Tavern and other such haunts. From these he was always sure to meet a warm welcome, abundant appreciation, and even flattery, for to this he was not inaccessible, while their humble station did not jar in any way on his social prejudices, nor their mediocre talents interfere with his love of pre-eminence. In such companies Burns no doubt had the gratification of feeling that he was, what is proverbially called, cock of the walk. The desire to be so probably grew with that growing dislike to the rich and the titled, which was observed in him after he came to Dumfries. In earlier days we have seen that he did not shrink from the society of the greatest magnates, and when they showed him that deference which he thought his due, he even enjoyed it. But now so bitter had grown his scorn and dislike of the upper classes, that we are told that if any one named a lord, or alluded to a man of rank in his presence, he instantly "crushed the offender in an epigram, or insulted him by some sarcastic sally." In a letter written during his first year at Dumfries, this is the way he speaks of his daily occupations:—"Hurry of business, grinding the faces of the publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of the Excise, making ballads, and then drinking and singing them; and over and above all, correcting the press of two different publications." But besides these duties by day, and the convivialities by night, there were other calls on his time and strength, to which Burns was by his reputation exposed. When those of the country gentry whom he still knew were in Dumfries for some hours, or when any party of strangers passing through the town, had an idle evening on their hands, it seems to have been their custom to summon Burns to assist them in spending it; and he was weak enough, on receiving the message, to leave his home and adjourn to the Globe, the George, or the King's Arms, there to drink with them late into the night, and waste his powers for their amusement. Verily, a Samson, as has been said, making sport for Philistines!

To one such invitation his impromptu answer was—

The king's most humble servant, I
Can scarcely spare a minute;
But I'll be with you by-and-by,
Or else the devil's in it.